Against the reading list

I kept a reading list for eleven years. At its peak it held four hundred and six titles. I have read, by my count, thirty-one of them — and of those thirty-one, twenty-six were books I would have read anyway, because something in the week pointed at them.

The list was doing almost nothing. It took me a long time to work out what the almost was.

The two people problem

A reading list is written by someone in a particular mood: usually late, usually after something good, usually feeling that they should be more serious than they are. That person adds The Man Without Qualities.

The person who has to read it is someone else. They are tired, on a Tuesday, in February. They did not agree to this, they were not consulted, and they are being supervised by a version of themselves who is not around to help.

Every entry is a small unpaid debt between the two, and the accumulated weight of four hundred of them is not motivating. It is the opposite. Opening the list is an encounter with everything you have failed to become.

What actually decides

When I look honestly at how a book gets read, the list is essentially never the mechanism. What decides is one of about four things:

1. It is physically here and the last one just ended.
2. Somebody I trust said something specific about it — not “it is great”, something specific.
3. It answers a question I am currently annoyed by.
4. I have already started it and stopping would be worse.

Three of those four are about the present. The list is a document about the past, and it competes badly.

The one thing it was for

Here is the almost.

Going back through eleven years of that list, the useful artefact was never the titles. It was the dates. I could see that in one particular autumn I added nine books about grief, and I did not remember choosing that, and I certainly did not notice at the time.

That is worth having. It is just not a reading list — it is a diary that happens to be written in book titles, and treating it as an instruction set was the error.

What I do now

A shelf, physically, of things I could start tonight. It holds about eleven books and it is the only queue. When something goes on it, something comes off, and that constraint does the work the list never did: it makes me choose rather than accumulate.

Everything else goes in a plain text file with a date and one line about why. I do not read it looking for what to read next. I read it about once a year, to find out what I was like.