Reading Habits – An Introduction

My 'To Read Pile' (more of a bookcase than a pile)

Having your own blog is a wonderful thing; you can waffle on about anything that you want to, and nobody can stop you.  By the same token, as a blog reader, you have every right not to read what I’m going to bore you about.  But give me a try and see what happens.

In the near future (ie next week), I’m planning a new feature in which I’ll give a run down of all the books that I’ve read (and acquired) in the previous month.  Unsurprisingly, it’s going to be called ‘Reading Habits’.  Before I do that though, I thought it might be an idea to give you an idea of my general reading habits, which will probably just end up proving how weird I am.

As you can see from the photo of my “to read pile”, I tend to acquire books much more quickly than I can read them.  This is partly because I’m a really slow reader, and that I don’t allocate as much time to reading as I’d like to.  The other reason is that I can’t stop buying books.  For the last few years my main source of books has been charity shops and Bookmooch.  Both these methods are great for getting books that you want for cheap, but it does mean that you have to get them as soon as you see them, as those particular titles may not make another appearance.  This does lead to something of an excess of books.

My main source for keeping track of what books I’d like to read is my Amazon Wishlist, which currently contains 115 items (although there are a few CDs and DVDs in that total).  I tend to add any books that I’m even vaguely interested in to it (and then to my Bookmooch Wishlist) and then have a regular pruning session to get rid of stuff that was added on too much of a whim.  I tend not to prune anything from my Bookmooch list, just to keep things interesting, and so that currently has a total of 167 books.

The Amazon Wishlist relates to another of my obsessions, Amazon Recommendations.  Way back in January, in my predictions for 2009, I made this forecast:

7. I’ll compulsively update my Amazon recommendations every dinner time while at work, not satisfied until I’ve checked up to at least 500 suggestions. Eventually it will recommend the perfect book. Hopefully.

Well the search for the perfect book continues.  I love searching through the recommendations, it’s somehow therapeutic, and even a little exciting when you get to recommendation number 567 and are able to click on ‘I own it’.  And yes, I know how sad that sounds.  Anyway, my constant scouring and updating of my recommendations also feeds back in to my wishlist.

So, I’ve explained how I’ve come to have so many books to read, which I’m not going to count the number of, but you can see is clearly over 100.  Now I have to explain how I go about reading them.  I’ve maintained a pretty big ‘to read pile’ for a number of years now, and I maintain a policy of at least attempting to read every book that I acquire, no matter how much it doesn’t appeal.  In the past, this lead to a lot of cherry picking, and thus some books were getting left forever.  What I needed was a system.

The system is simple, firstly every book stays in chronological order of acquisition.  This means that the book that I’ve had the longest is on the far left of the top shelf, and the newest book in the collection is on the far right of the bottom shelf (the books that aren’t actually stacked on shelves, I’ll come to later).  Every new book that I get goes to the bottom of the pile.  Now, I’m not going to tell you that I read them all in order, it would get WAY too boring.  What I actually do is read alternately the ‘oldest’ book followed by a free choice.  This means that all the books will definitely get their turn, but gives me enough flexibility to keep it interesting.  I realise that I must sound mental, but I’ll continue.

You’ll spot the aforementioned books that are sat in piles, rather than on the shelves, and these come in two categories.  The three piles on the bottom shelf are just basic overflow; books that won’t fit on the shelves but are still kept in order. These books eventually find a way on to the shelves as all the others shuffle along.  There is an additional rule that I can’t read any of these overflow books until they are properly situated on a shelf.  This stops me cherry picking the most recent additions, which I’ll obviously be most enthusiastic about reading.

The two piles on the middle shelf are books that I’ve acquired that are part of a series of novels, but I have gaps in the run.  These don’t join the ‘official’ pile until I have found the missing links in the chain (now I know that I’m starting to sound like a potential serial killer).  Currently I am waiting for books in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, and loads of Christopher Brookmyre novels (which I don’t even think are technically a serial, but I still want to read in order – too many years of reading comics has drummed continuity in to my brain).

A final rule applies: when I get my ‘free choice’ I can only choose a book that I can actually see.  This is born out of the practicality of not wanting to move the piles of books rather than for more anal reasons.

So, those are my reading habits, and I know that I appear to be completely insane.  I assure you that sanity will prevail when I review for you the books I read in August, in the first official Reading Habits post.