Anyone can apply logic, taste, and methodical research to the problem of selecting which limited subset of the vast number of books available one is to read. Conversely, one can half-ass one’s way through Mt. Tsundoku using methods of dubious reliability. Don’t believe me? Here are five methods I have used, each more ludicrous than the one before.
One method that might seem justifiable is snapping up books based on purely on the publisher. Indeed, I am certain that were I to poll publishers, they would be unanimous in their hearty agreement that purchasing a book because it was from a specific publisher is an excellent idea. However, the flaw in this approach is that it is a rare publisher that does not offer a wide range of books. Even a publisher thought to focus on shoot-em-ups wrapped in lurid, eye-melting covers may publish the odd Joanna Russ and Barry Malzberg work. Knowing the general sort of book a publisher publishes does not necessarily tell you anything about a specific book. A closer look is mandated.
Nevertheless, I picked up James White’s Monsters and Medics purely because it was published by Del Rey Books. I’d forgotten having read a White earlier and didn’t know what to expect. I did know I’d enjoyed previous books published by Del Rey, so I took a chance on the White. It paid off!1 Monsters and Medics is still one of my favourite collections.
If there’s one saying that is drummed into readers’ heads, it is never judge a book by its cover. Covers serve to entice readers, but they do not necessarily reflect the content of the book. One would have to be misguided indeed to base one’s expectations on covers that may have nothing at all to do with the content of the book.2
Nevertheless! Any publisher that cared to slap a John Berkey cover on a book vastly increased the odds of me plunking down my buck seventy-five.3 This worked out incredibly well for me. I remember fondly such works as Fred Pohl’s The Gold at the Starbow’s End, C. J. Cherryh’s Hunter of Worlds, and Jerry Pournelle’s 2020 Vision, which share little beyond their cover artist. In fact, the Berkey method was so successful I immediately picked up Pohl’s Gateway purely because the Berkey cover caught my eye, despite the very significant handicap that the cover was actually by Boris Vallejo.
My grandmother confused Robertson Davies’ What’s Bred in the Bone with Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and on discovering her error, consigned What’s Bred in the Bone unread to the guest room bedside table. Canadian literature generally isn’t my jam, but as soon as I saw the Davies, I had to read it because I was feeling antisocial and it was within reach. Obtaining any other book would have potentially involved talking to people. This selection paid off handsomely. As a result, I have an extensive collection of well-read Davies books.
Another excellent way to land in my book basket was by boldly embracing alphabetical proximity to another author I liked. Harry Harrison was next to Robert A. Heinlein, so I gave his books a try. Clifford D. Simak was near Robert Silverberg, so onto the to-buy list went City. Obviously, if I liked Vonda N. McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, it followed that I might like McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. In retrospect, this seems less like logic than a reluctance to turn my head slightly, but it worked.
In fact, I have been known to try books purely because they were in my direct line of sight at the moment I had an urge to read something. A prominent example of this is Diana Rowland’s Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues, whose eye-catching cover was displayed at eye level in Waterloo Public Library. Conveniently for me, Even White Trash Zombies Get the Blues and its tale of a woman trying to better herself despite substance abuse issues and the small matter of being dead functioned as a standalone. It even enticed me to read more books by the same author.
No doubt you have your own dubious and yet functional methods for selecting which book to read next. Feel free to mention them in the comments below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]To keep a generally positive tone, I will admit there were times when buying a book on the basis of the publisher blew up in my face. I will stop short of actually mentioning “Lord Foul’s Bane.”
[2]For example, the governing artistic principle behind a lot of covers in the 1970s seemed to be a passionate commitment to gratuitous nudity. Thus, the cover of Poul Anderson’s “Tales of the Flying Mountains.” I would append an image if only Tor.com footnotes permitted it. It features a headless torso with bare breasts on a collection about asteroid mining. I will admit that the cover of Marian Engel’s “The Bear” (again, I bet Tor.com is very happy that I cannot have images in footnotes) didn’t hurt my odds of reading it but (like most of the teens who wore out Waterloo Oxford District Secondary School’s copy) I was primarily motivated by *intellectual curiosity* about what virtues are sufficient for the Governor General’s Award to be given to a novel about a woman who fucks a bear. Oh course it was intellectual curiosity. Why are you laughing? By the way, there are few pleasures more delightful than watching Americans discover that particular example of Can Lit. It did deserve its award, for the record.
[3]$1.75 is outrageous! I remember when books were $0.95!
I use one simple criteria when scanning the SF titles in some Dublin bookshop – the width of the spine. An SF novel under 200 pages is a rarity indeed and is usually (a) an established classic or (b) a book its publishers believe to be so mindblowingly original, its shortness is irrelevant.
I kept an eye out for translated SF and imported non-North American SF, reasoning there had to be a reason people went to the effort of bringing them in. The problem, at least when I was a teen, was that a lot of translations–not naming DAW’s in particular here–weren’t great.
“It was next to the book I wanted to read and I grabbed it by accident” is a great way to discover new books.
Lately I buy a lot of books by people who are Twitter friends (and sometimes RL friends) of authors whose books I like. (Substitute other social media if you don’t do Twitter.)
This has worked out surprisingly well, or perhaps unsurprisingly well, depending on your reasoning about the approach. I don’t reason about it myself, so much as get sympathetically enthused when person A starts raving about their friend B’s book or vice versa and race off to buy it on Kindle, preorder it, or at least throw it onto my wish list.
At one grandparent’s house, I ended up reading an awful lot of Readers Digest condensed books and remember almost none of them. However, a single stay with my brother in a spare room of his dingy apartment in the Mission District led to my discovering ‘Watchmen’, when it was still fairly new, Bill Sienkeiwicz’s ‘Elektra: Assassin’, and Delany’s ‘Neveryon’ books, so choose well whose home you crash at.
James, I hope we never need to bring up, or indeed even mention, your recurrent use of praeteritio or apophasis. Let us pass over it without a word.
Re footnote 2: I can’t quite get an amusing pun about a connection between “asteroid mining” versus “getting your rocks off”.
So far I have used “dating an author I liked” and “confused them with someone who was married to an author I like.” It worked out reasonably well in both cases
Alphabetical proximity FTW! One of the first SF books I discovered was Andre Norton’s The Time Traders in my last year of elementary school. When I moved on to junior high, I discovered there were LOTS of Nortons in the school library, and Alan E Nourse was right next to them. It took me a while to move on to other SF books in that library … Heinlein juveniles, the Paul French Lucky Starr books (which had the advantage of being next to the Walter Farley horse books), and others. Wow. It’s been 50+ years and I can still picture where those books were located spatially in that library.
$0.95?! I remember when books were $0.40! (I’m looking at you, THE BLACK STAR PASSES.)
“It’s next to where the book I’m looking for would be, if someone else hadn’t borrowed it” can also work.
This is part of why I went into the library stacks in college to get my books, rather than handing in a call slip and having the books brought to me: there was no way to file a call slip for “the books on either side of $specific_book.”
“I wandered the stacks and it caught my eye” is a favorite method of mine.
Also- “writer mentioned other writer in the story”, so I read it. I blame Heinlein for my finding both Kipling and Jerome K. Jerome. Don’t know who to blame/thank for P.G. Wodehouse.
@noblehunter:
I initially misinterpreted “dating an author I liked” to mean you “dating an author…” which would be a completely awesome way to discover good books, but the meaning I assume you intended is excellent too. Your post reminds me I’ve really got to open up that Delia Sherman collection I bought recently. (I already knew some of her writing, and knew she was married to Ellen Kushner, but it’s never a bad time to read more.)
Anyway, this is clearly a refinement of my own Twitter-friends algorithm. My big success there is that Charlie Stross once recommended Cassandra Khaw’s horror, which led me to buy one of her books and then to like one of her selfies, which has led to buying all her other books, making a bunch of new Twitter friends, and many new book recs.
Related note: Cass’s first SF novel The All-Consuming World is out today and I have a copy! The excerpt I read while it was in progress felt like the freshest take on cyberpunk/space-opera which I’ve read in ages – think Bruce Stirling’s ‘Schismatrix’, Michael Swanwick’s ‘Vacuum Flowers’, Ian Banks’ Special Circumstances novels. I’m really looking forward to reading the rest of this book.
@OtterB: Ah, nostalgia. I still have a very clear visual image of the ‘Z’ shelf of the SF section in the main Ann Arbor public library, where I first found Zelazny’s Amber books.
@7, 9: Alphabetical proximity! Not so much now, when I’m spoiled for books in multiple sources. But when I was in school, eons ago before YA literature was so much of a thing, I graduated from the children’s section of the library straight to the adult stacks. And I’d pick a section from the alphabetical-by-author fiction shelves, and I’d browse through it, title by title, until I found something that looked interesting. I read all sorts of stuff that way. (some of which was clearer to me, in my younger years, than others. But I learned all sorts of stuff that way too.)
@10: And that’s how I found P. G. Wodehouse, sitting innocently in the W’s.
Way back when Amazon was young, they used the “same publisher” algorithm for recommendations. “Oh, you liked Bujold? I bet you’ll like these other Baen authors!” Yeah, no.
“Oh, you liked Salmondson’s Amazons? Then you will like Norman’s Gor as well!”
(Note to young readers: someone who liked Amazons probably would dislike Gor.)
I know someone who is well-read in non-fiction. Her technique is to pick a colour, find books of that colour at the library and then read the ones that look interesting.
Author name similarity is exploitable. In some genres authors appear to be picking pseudonyms similar to the names famous authors. For example, there are dozens of Romance authors currently writing under the surname ‘Quinn’.
This is the sequel you contemplated to the “Stupid Reasons I Didn’t Read a Book” post from a few days ago, slightly re-pitched, isn’t it?
16: it is!
Another method from the 1970s was the numbering of books from a publisher: DAW books prominently numbered their books from the beginning. I remember seeing books 1-4 in an Alexander’s department store when they were first released, and I was hooked for many a year (the less said about Laser books, the better)…
@9: Going into the stacks and looking at the books adjacent to the ones I had found in the card catalog was my primary method of doing research when I was a student, back before the internet was much of a thing.
My only use of the rule of Alphabetical Proximity has been with names beginning with “Mc”. So, yes, McIntyre and McKillip, but also McCaffrey and McKinley. All authors I liked a great deal. This led me to the irrational expectation that all SFF by Mc-authors would be worth reading. Amazingly, this irrational belief has worked out rather well for me. Maureen McHugh. Seanan McGuire. And on the children’s SF front, Sophia McDougall and her wonderful Mars Evacuees series, which I have successfully used to lure tweens into the genre.
@14,
I would worry about anyone who likes Gor books, and would probably try to insure he got nowhere near my daughters.
@JDN, @3, @7, @9, inter alia:
Some of the local libraries are no longer segregating SFF from main line books (although they continue to isolate mysteries and westerns. I’ve never noticed a separate “romance” shelf), which makes the “next to” algorithm less efficient for finding SFF, although I still use it in libraries which segregate by genre.
@8,
Another young whippersnapper. I remember when they went up to $0.40
Ninety-five cents?
Hellkite, man, I remember complaining about paying that much for a book. When I first started buying the price for a typical paperback — which, to be fair, was significantly slimmer than a typical paperback today (is there an analogy to the supersizing of American restaurant portions?) — was thirty-five to fifty cents.
For the past five years or so, I’ve mostly chosen books and serieses because they (or something else by the same author) caught my eye when described in articles here on the Tor blogs. I rely on downloadable audiobooks and thus don’t browse libraries and bookstores much anymore, but I visit here every day.
@21 Some libraries segregate-sort-of, and you have to look in multiple places. Ken Liu’s Dandelion Kingdom stuff is in adult fiction. But Cixin Liu is in SF, at my local branch. They also have a mystery section (much larger than the SF section), but I’d still check adult fiction. The one where I lived in west Texas separated into genealogy/local history (on the balcony), children’s, and adults. (Their book sale sorted nonfiction by Dewey category. I kept wanting to put political biographies into fiction. Or humor.)
My local public library bought genre books by the pound. Literally, they would get so many pounds of mysteries and so many pounds of science fiction. It’s at least as rational as buying books by the foot. Anyway, I read all the science fiction that came in. It was very diverse, everything from Joanna Russ to E.E. “Doc” Smith.
I’ve picked up several author’s works because I liked their LiveJournal/Blog/Twitter. (This has been surprisingly successful.)
I’ve read a couple of things because I liked songs inspired by them. (Also watched one tv show on this basis. 80s metal is surprisingly good for recommendations.)
And once it was completely due to the book having an odd title. (The Shadow of the Torturer isn’t the weirdest title, but it stood out in my parents’ SFF collection.)
I first read Tolkien via the excerpt of The Hobbit in a Mother Goose magazine; the excerpt was Bilbo finding the ring . . . and I’m not sure how soon I read The Hobbit but by ninth grade I had read LOTR and found memorizing the poem about the Rings much more interesting than anything the physical science teacher was telling us about physics or whatever he was talking about that day.
The local library used to have “Mystery” and “Scifi” stickers on the spines of the book. I haven’t been to the library in about two years, though, so it could all be different.
@10 and @12, TV and a vhs cover at the library introduced me to Wodehouse and E. F. Benson :).
My current approach is to read books from the back row on any given shelf. Otherwise I may forget they’re there (some of my shelves contain three rows of books). So I’m currently working my way through Jack McDevitt. By fortuitous coincidence, it was only a few months ago that I obtained the last book that I was missing from his Academy series, so he may have been at the forefront of my mind anyway when I was recently deciding what to read next.
I’ve also occasionally used the technique of selecting the book I’ve had for the longest but still haven’t read. But both of these techniques go out the window if any author I consider a friend brings out a new book, because I find it horribly embarrassing if I’m speaking with them in a social setting and have to admit that I haven’t.yet read their latest, if it’s more than six months old or so.
I actually have two main methods.
The first is for second hand books where I tend to pick up the book by specific authors. A list on my phone of all the books I have and so by default have read (long story) helps here. Knowing them to be great authors I have no qualms picking up a Simak, Brunner, Silverberg, Vance etc. I have not read. I am rarely let down
For new books its harder: First there is the author, not so many as in the second hand list; second the number of the series – I will immediately ignore anything that is not the first book of series unless of course I have it; thirdly the blurb on the back- gives me a rough idea of the story and in joint fourth the cover art or quote on the cover – has been known to throw up some gems.
I’ve been known to pick my next book to read on whether it will be a contrasting color with what I’ve already read in a given year on “Library Thing.” So basically I’m partially reading by implementing the “four color” theorem!
I use the SF Encyclopedia Picture Gallery to display a random book and get it if it appeals to me.
Buying a book simply because it has a nice cover is moronic. It doesn’t tell you that it’s a good book – just that the marketing people knew to commission a good artist.
Needless to say that I’ve bought more than one book because it has a nice cover!
@@@@@ 10:
I got my hands on Simak’s Ring Around the Sun because it was mentioned in Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis. (More than just mentioned, actually. Someone recommends that novel to a boy in the book, and I figured that King must have liked Simak’s novel to have included it in his story.)
I also first became aware of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat because Connie Willis took the title of her time travel novel To Say Nothing of the Dog from the subtitle of Jerome’s book. That got me intrigued and I saw that this old book got near-universal praise which prompted me to buy it.
(I later learned that I actually had known about that story, albeit indirectly, without being aware of it, as it was the source material of an old German comedy movie that I had seen years earlier.)
Unless the books in that picture are glued together for show, that setup is going to kill someone.
In the late 60s, Silverlock was reprinted in paperback. It sold for 75 cents.
As John Myers Myers attested in his Silverlock Alphabet.
A’s the abyss, and a man to the Devil
B is the great Beowulf, holding high revel
C is lithe Circe, without inhibitions
D is the Delian, ordainer of missions
E’s Euphenspiegel, a prankster and jiber
F is Fjoine, a royal imbiber
G’s des Grieux, made a cuckold by Lucius
H is Houynyhm, wise as Confucius
I is Innini, a dangerous trollop
J’s Friar John of the powerfull wallop
K’s Karenina, poor passionate Anna
L in Long River, as pleasing as manna
M is the Murgatroyds, desperatly haunted
N is fair Nimue, desperatly wanted
O is the Oracle, shaking and wailing
P is Promethius, whose liver is ailing
Q is Quixote, the champion of ladies
R’s Rhadamanthus, a justice in Hades
S is Semiramis, queenly but lusty
T is young Tamlane, whose lover is trusty
U is dark Usher, the site of the tower
V is Van Kortland, as bold as Glendower
W’s Watling Street, road of adventure
X is bright Xanadu, grand beyond censure
Y’s lady Yang, and enchantment while riding
Z’s mighty Zeus, and a mystic cow-hiding.
There is the alphabet, listing each letter
Yet not listing episodes, matching or better
Encountered by dozens, with Shandon as leader
But shared, even-Stephen, with you as the reader
For Silverlock tells of his marvelous journey
Through John Myers Myers, who has power of attorney
To pass it to you with the imprint of Ace;
At every good bookstore, six bits on the face.
That Alphabet was why I bought the book. It was not included in latter editions at a higher price.
@34:
A previous pastor in my village had a small study room situated in the house corner. It was maybe 10 m² big (that’s some 110 ft² for you guys from the US).
The two sides facing outward had windows and “normal” walls, the other two sides (one of which had the door that lead into the room) was covered from top to bottom with shelves full of books. It was less chaotic than what’s shown on the picture here in the sense that no books (IIRC) were placed on top of each other; they rather were standing neatly next to each other (like in a library) but still very densely so that you didn’t see much of the wallpaper behind them.
I’ve always been fascinated by this even though I’ve only been two or three times in that room.
If somebody got slain by them, I’m unaware of it. ;-)
@36
It was mostly the books piled haphazardly on top of books, such that the whole wall of books could collapse outward, that was freaking me out.
Sure enough, it’s an outdoor art installation.
https://twitter.com/rabihalameddine/status/623721849696878592
Sometimes I read (or listen mostly) in themes such as: Friend and Family Suggestions, Alaska, Non-fiction, Around the World, Black History Month, Books I Read Decades Ago by Favorite Authors, and Japanese Literature..
Right now I’m crossing books off a Book Bingo sheet I found online. I already own dozens and dozens of audiobooks that I haven’t listened to so mostly I pick from what I own already.
Years ago I got a biography of James Baldwin as a present. So I read some of his books, moved on to Richard Wright. One of his books was compared to Crime and Punishment I read that. I just kept reading things that had some kind of relationship to each other.
@37:
“books piled haphazardly on top of books” – yeah, that was the very thing that was different in that real-life study room I’ve described. Also, IIRC, the shelves were not as narrow as the one on the picture.
I have to agree with you that this installation doesn’t look awfully stable.
I also hadn’t realized that it was outdoors. I wonder if these are even real books. This apparently is in central Italy and even though the weather there surely doesn’t have the constant rain you’ll have in places like Britain but it will rain from time to time and that would ruin real books unless you’d cover the whole wall.
So, if these aren’t real books (or books that aren’t meant to be read anymore seeing that they might get damaged by the elements) I could imagine that some of them are somehow attached (glued? nailed? whatever) to the shelves or the wall to provide for additional stability.
Anyway, this looks awesome to a book lover but the idea collapses (quicker than the actual structure, I hope) under scrutiny.
I bit like this sofa. Looks cool at first but isn’t such a great idea in practice once you think about it:
Looks like the linked picture didn’t make it through, even though I saw it in the preview.
Let’s try again…
Covers are especially misleading when publishers reuse them for other books like German SFF publishers did for a while.
I half remember an anecdote in which an artist, hearing of Jack Vance’s displeasure with a cover, resolved to create art uniquely suited to the book it was intended for. Having turned it in, the artist was then informed it was too good for the book it was actually intended for, so it was going be used on Jack Vance’s book.
Nobody has mentioned the Just Returned trolley in the library. Where aged 12 I picked up enough Gollancz yellowjackets subsequently returned to the SF section that I started reading from that section and thus took home Brian Aldiss’s The Dark Light Years as the first book I ever read _because_ it was sf. I still find books this way from time to time, although it’s a long time since I discovered a whole new section of the library.
I also have used the “involved with an author I like” with success — Elizabeth Bear & Scott Lynch! Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson!
When I read a book from my TBR bookcases, I often follow it up with a book choses as the Mod of the book pages/books in the bookcase.
Am I permitted to arrange marriages between authors whose books I want to read?
@45,
Only if also change your name to Emma Woodhouse.