Skip to content

Five More Extremely Unscientific Methods for Picking Your Next Book

29
Share

Five More Extremely Unscientific Methods for Picking Your Next Book

Home / Five More Extremely Unscientific Methods for Picking Your Next Book
Books reading

Five More Extremely Unscientific Methods for Picking Your Next Book

By

Published on February 27, 2023

Photo: Christin Hume [via Unsplash]
29
Share
Photo: Christin Hume [via Unsplash]

Many of us want to read All the Books; most of us lack the time to do so. How, then, to select the next work to read? Way back in 2021 I suggested five possible methods to help make the decision slightly easier. Here are five more.1 I won’t claim that any of these are guaranteed to make you happy with your choice, but they do offer ways to sift through the vast mountains of possibilities.

One can deliberately select books by authors who for reason of native language, nation of origin, ethnicity or some other issue seem likely to have had barriers to publication in North America in English. For their book to be on the shelf at all, it must have evinced qualities that convinced a publisher to set aside systemic bias.2 It is an interesting question whether this method is evidence of a laudably open mind or of a tendency to exploit systemic injustice for personal pleasure.

Translated SF is an obvious example. Case in point: the DAW edition of Arkadi and Boris Strugatski’s Hard to Be a God, which focuses on the travails of a covert monitor living on a barbarous world. Russian SF at the height of the Cold War? Had to be something there to inspire DAW to publish it. Alas, that particular translation isn’t great, he said very diplomatically. It’s fortunate that better, more recent translations exist.

Sometimes I become irrationally inspirationally fixated on a specific background element of a story. This is something that I just cannot ignore (much like trying to carry on cooking after rubbing one’s eye after cutting up hot peppers). Such details are often worldbuilding elements … such as spaceship change in velocities (delta vees).

Back in the 1990s there weren’t many stories set in interplanetary space that featured plausible delta vees.3 I read a fair number of Paul Preuss works because they met that need. I still own a full set of his Venus Prime novels, detailing the adventures of a cyborg, code-named Sparta, as she survives various thrilling events, each one built around a seed of an Arthur C. Clarke short story.

Speaking of odd cognitive quirks—since 2020 or so I’ve had difficulty maintaining focus long enough to finish a long novel. I would be embarrassed to tell you how many interesting books are stuck on page one on my Kobo, abandoned when I saw the page count was five or six hundred. Novellas can be just the thing for the impatient read.

On a day when I didn’t feel up to reading a Winnowing Flame volume, Winnowing Flame author Jen Williams’ Seven Dead Sisters offered an enjoyable evening of horror: Would Alizon escape execution for murdering her father? And should she? Given the short page count, Seven Dead Sisters more than delivered the twists and dread revelations I wanted.

From time to time, I discover that I have been laboring under the false impression I’d already read something. Having discovered my misapprehension, it is natural to track down the book. After all, there must have been some reason I thought I had read it.

Case in point: Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint, which I have owned since publication. Until 2021 I was absolutely convinced I had read it. Perhaps I had confused it with another series (Astreiant is a possibility) or perhaps I was misled by having read The Privilege of the Sword, a sequel.4 I finally spotted my error and read Kushner’s endearing tale. Moral: don’t piss off the town’s most deadly duelist.

Procrastination. Nothing inspires furious activity from me quite like a rapidly approaching deadline involving a completely unrelated matter. You don’t want to know how many Tor essays begin as me putting off another task. Books remain high on the list of valuable procrastination tools, no matter how many new methods (such as YouTube videos) enter the field.5

There is no doubt my calculus mark in 1980 would have been greatly enhanced had I actually studied for the exam. What I actually did was sneak a copy of David Gerrold’s Space Skimmer (Foundation meets group therapy, more or less) and read that instead of studying! I still own my copy of Space Skimmer while the disappointing mark on my calculus test has been lost in the depths of time.6

***

 

These are but five of the methods I use to pick my next read. No doubt many of you have methods every bit as noteworthy. Feel free to mention them in comments, which are, as ever, below.

In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.

[1]An honorary sixth method, of limited applicability save to oldbies: “neglecting to send the SFBC card back in time to prevent the book from being shipped.” See https://reactormag.com/2021/11/02/five-great-books-i-never-meant-to-read/

[2]What I am sure will be an entirely uncontroversial example: this may explain why when I ran the numbers on gender breakdown in the Hugos, women seemed less likely to be nominated, but if nominated, more likely to win. To get nominated at all, they had to clear a higher bar.

[3]I don’t at all care for high acceleration, high delta vee rockets, for reasons that are too boring for me to finish this sent

[4]The SFBC sent me “The Privilege of the Sword” (a sequel) for review because I was their read-stuff-out-of-order guy. Which is how I came to read intermediate volumes in the Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time series without reading the preceding volumes. I do not recommend that approach with those two series.

[5]Procrastination by reading works fine, unless you’re *supposed* to be reading. If you want to dilly-dally, you have to do other stuff. Right now I should be reading a June Hur mystery for review.

[6]I know for a fact that I had forgotten all my calculus by 1990 because I then encountered a mathematical problem that required calculus to tackle. However, not only do I remember the plot and characters of “Space Skimmer,” I remember the room in which I read it and the occasional moments when I considered studying and then convinced myself that I could easily cram for the test after just a few more pages.

About the Author

James Davis Nicoll

Author

In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, current CSFFA Hall of Fame nominee, five-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, Beaverton contributor, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, 2025 Aurora Award finalist James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
Learn More About James

See All Posts About

Subscribe
Notify of
Avatar


29 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Avatar
2 years ago

“much like trying to carry on cooking after rubbing one’s eye after cutting up hot peppers”

I shan’t ask how you know, as I know enough of your history to be certain it’s from experience.

Re: delta vee, I think Niven’s Integral Trees got that right. It was just the rest of the story that was ridiculous!

I had finished failing calculus well before 1980, but I have still occasionally found a use for the stuff I’d learned by 1976.

Avatar
2 years ago

For those of us who do watch too much YouTube, an excellent way to stop watching it and start reading is to rapidly watch multiple videos that depress the hell out of you. This causes a reaction like “OMG I have to get off this planet”, which, once you realize is mostly impossible for you, results in reading about people who ARE off this planet.

snowkeep
2 years ago

I once broke a bottle of Tabasco sauce while cooking.  Cleaned it all up, but the next morning, I learned I didn’t wash my hands well enough.  My contact lenses had marinated in dilute Tabasco all night.

voidampersand
2 years ago

I still like the technique of going to the library and reading all the books in the science fiction section, in alphabetical order as they are filed. My small town library had two bookcases of SF, all in paperback. The library system acquired genre paperbacks by the pound, so the shelves contained essentially a random sample of what was being published.

Avatar
2 years ago

One of my cats had an inordinate fondness for chewing electric cables so to save his life, I coated all the accessible power cords in the hottest hot sauce I could find. It was only after it was too late I discovered I should have worn gloves while I was doing that…

Avatar
2 years ago

4: That was my standard method in grade school: start at A and work my way through to Z. It usually took me about a year to get through each new library. Rural schools tended not to have huge libraries (although I kept moving to increasingly large schools, with increasingly large libraries, yay).

Avatar
2 years ago

@@@@@ Footnote 1: My mother was always very prompt in returning her SFBC card, so we never really used that method.

Avatar
2 years ago

I also use something like a Drunkard’s Walk, where something in the book I am reading leads me to track down something else. The Hur, for example, inspired me to order The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea. Lady Hyegyong was married to (and documented the death of) Crown Prince Sado, who for various compelling reasons was locked in a wooden rice chest by his father and left to die.

Avatar
2 years ago

I like the “books mentioned in books I’m reading” method.  As an example, Anderson and Heinlein (not to mention Pournelle) got me to Rudyard Kipling. 

I’m still sorry that Companions of Vinland is no more available to me than to Anthony Villiers.

Avatar
Alexx Kay
2 years ago

“For their book to be on the shelf at all, it must have evinced qualities that convinced a publisher to set aside systemic bias.”

I shared much this same thought during the first wave of translated manga. “Surely works worthy of being translated must be the best of the best!” After reading most of that first wave, I realized that Sturgeon’s Law is fractal. No matter what selection criteria anyone (who isn’t me) uses, 90% of it will still (to me) be crap. (And 10% of it *won’t* be crap. There are no entirely bad genres.)

Avatar
2 years ago

I was on a panel with a younger person who was utterly baffled why older people liked Akira so much, given that it’s mostly chase scenes. Her context, a world where manga and anime are easily acquired so people can be choosy, is very different from the 1980s, where very little like Akira had ever made it to North America.

Avatar
2 years ago

I reserve ebooks that interest me in the libraries I have access to. When they turn up as available I assess where I am in my current reads (I generally have a heavy and light book going) and borrow it or tell Libby to deliver it later. I currently have 22 holds waiting, which Tor posts constantly add to.

Avatar
Vrouwke
2 years ago

@9: same here!

An author I’ve noticed doing this often, is John Scalzi. So far, I’ve read The Forever War by Joe Haldeman, and Do androids dream of electric sheep, by Philip K Dick because of his mentions – and I’m happy I did.

So. Snow crash by Neal Stephenson will follow as soon as I’ve found it in the piles.

Avatar
Jenny
2 years ago

I am lucky enough to have a book buddy. While I don’t love everything she recommends and vice versa, and we are careful to provide content warnings, we have certainly introduced each other to a lot of great authors. 

Avatar
Avri
2 years ago

Over the years I have built up a ludicrous (several hundred) TBR pile in my nook.  A few years back I started reading them in alphabetical order by author.  I just reached the end of the Ms and, since I’ve continued to acquire titles, I still have almost as many books to read in A through M as I do N through Z . . .

Avatar
saidahgilbert
2 years ago

Procrastination is my go-to method. I always find myself reading the most when I have work to do.

@Avri I’ve started using a method similar to that. Except my Kindle is sorted into collections so I just pick a collection, download all the unread books and read by author. Of course, new books get added to the collection but I’ve decided to read what’s downloaded on my Kindle first before downloading new books. So I’ve managed to shrink my TBR pile from 1000s to 100s. After all, out of sight, out of mind (if I only consider Kindle ebooks. My physical book pile is also huge in number and I just keep collecting more and more books.)

Avatar
northmo
2 years ago

that’s a great referred post on unintentional choices:
https://www.tor.com/2021/11/02/five-great-books-i-never-meant-to-read/

Avatar
2 years ago

I would be embarrassed to tell you how many interesting books are stuck on page one on my Kobo, abandoned when I saw the page count was five or six hundred.

Yes. This.

I also sometimes decide no as soon as it seems the book is a start to a trilogy. I know that by the time the next book comes out I won’t remember some key details or feel inspired to continue.

I’ve started reading more Stephen King again in the past year, despite the long page count, because I pretty well know I’ll enjoy it. But honestly, I want more stand alone books in the <375 page range. That used to be pretty standard, but now tomes and trilogies seem to be pretty much the rule.

*and this is where I put in my standard plea to authors/publishers who do insist on sequels/trilogies/serueto please include a detailed summary of what came before because really, I can’t read all the books and reread as well.

Avatar
E H Buchan-Kimmerly
2 years ago

As a writer with a novella currently doing the rounds of publishers, please continue to urge readers to enjoy more novellas.

As  a reader, I like that e-books often are novellas. And that some of my favourites  (Chambers,Aaronovitch) tend to write series which are not sequels. 

As an online seller of used/ preloved books, I like books that are less than 2cm thick and under 500grams.

Avatar
2 years ago

Japanese light novels tend to cram in about as much plot as much longer North American works. A favourite example is Lord of the Sands of Time, which covers the plots of two Turtledove series in as many paragraphs…

Avatar
2 years ago

About one in five [1] of my reviews are olden timey books from before 1981. I am often impressed by how … efficient … the plots are.

1: or more, if I am doing a project like “review all the Orbit books” or “review all of Judth Merril’s Best of anthologies”.

Avatar
2 years ago

I have forgotten the trigonometry I was studying for O level in1961. The classroom was so quiet that sparrows flew in through the windows to pick up crumbs from the buns we had brought over from break.I can still hear the whir of their wings & the click of their claws on the lino.

Avatar
2 years ago

22: Back in 2022, I commandeered a UWaterloo lounge to zoom-interview Sarah Tolmie, there not being enough time to get home first. The lounge itself was ideal for my purpose… except that all through the interview I was very aware a large skunk was methodically prying at the lounge’s external door, trying to force its way inside. Wildlife on campus understands how doors work and that food and shelter can be found on the other side of them.

This particular animal invested a lot of effort trying to follow students into the building for the next few weeks before giving up. Or more likely, finding a den in another building.

Avatar
2 years ago

@18–if you start a series with book 6, summaries are of limited help (the fact I was trying to read book 6 in the Francis Lymond chronicles while recovering from a root canal was probably a very bad idea to begin with. It made a *lot* more sense the second time around after I’d read the others). And some books are um, difficult to summarize. Hands of the Emperor *could* be summarized, along with the other books that it would be helpful to read before attempting At the Feet of the Sun, but um…you would lose a lot. However, summaries as an aide-memoire in order to trigger the memories of the books you’ve already read? That is certainly a thought. 

Avatar
2 years ago

I got the giggles, both from the article and some of the comments. Too relatable!!! My reading habits have covered most of the mentioned strategies over the years.

For a long time I would be reading 5 different books at the same time – one by my bed, one in the bathroom (usually short attention span non fiction – anyone remember the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader collection?) another by my recliner, one in my purse (bought specifically to handle a full size hardcover of course), and another in my desk at work. I never had trouble keeping the stories straight – one glace at the last paragraph before the bookmark and I was plunged back in.

That was quite a while ago, and  nowadays I may still have multiple books in progress at the same time, sometimes months will go by when I simply don’t have it in me to sit and just read. Haven’t lost the knack of diving back in, but it doesn’t feel quite as compact a process. I did finally learn to put a book aside if I wasn’t enjoying it, however – life is too short to waste on a bad choice. It might not be a bad book per se (some however….) but just not right for me or for now.

Of my 500+ physical books – 90% are unread  The few I read and determine are potentially good for a re-read I keep, otherwise I donate them (friend, library, thrift store) to make room for the next new book ;-) 

My 4500+ Kindle books get the worst of the out of sight out of mind treatment, despite being right at hand in the app on my phone. I took over a two years to finish one novella (The Ballad of Black Tom), but quite enjoyed it. In the meantime I am partway through the Murderbot series (book 3 I think), and still amid the amazing imagery and fascination of His Majesty’s Dragon, as well as rereading Child of Fortune, plus Gideon the Ninth, and one I started and really enjoyed before I got distracted, and now is lost in the morass of my Kindle because I’ve temporarily forgotten the title (man exploring a house that is a world, with its own ocean, and thinks he is alone….but)

Ah well, those are my Kindle stories currently in Limbo, as I carry A Wise Man’s Fear in my car to read while waiting in doctor’s offices. SMH 

Mel-EpicReading
2 years ago

I have begun deciding what to read by a new criteria. At least every second or third book I read MUST be from my print to be read shelf. You see I tend to read my library books first (and they are never ending as my library buys stuff I recommend!); which has resulted in many of my most anticipated books going unread because I pre-ordered or bought on release day. 
My other criteria is that I must not read a sci-fi, in-depth fantasy or YA book one after another (unless in the same series); that way I stand a chance of remembering what I read all year and not combining plots and characters into one non-existent book. 
Oh, and review copies (hey TOR, Orbit approves me for everything and you nothing these days… likely because I’m always stupid behind, so I get it, lol). So this year it has been library, review, print (repeat). And if some of those overlap then bonus!!! 
I wholeheartedly agree with picking up lesser published folks books. I try to read (right away) anything by an author that interests me and lives in my city or area (C. L. Polk is my current just read local; one day she will do an event in her home town I hope!). And I prioritize overall Canadian authors over others to make sure I hit my 30% Canadian content quota for the year. I also have a 30% queer content requirement, and (new last year) a 10% indigenous requirement. Last year almost 60% of what I read was queer or had queer representation which was a big milestone to hit!! 
Needless to say my TBR is a vast list in a spreadsheet with many columns and values. But never underestimate the option to just pick a number, scroll through your TBR list and read the book that corresponds. Sometimes random is the best option 

Mel-EpicReading
2 years ago

@slywolf – that unknown title booksounds like Piranesi by Susanna Clarke! 
Amazing (and super short) book. :) 

Avatar
Daniella
2 years ago

Or if not Piranesi (as suggests), then maybe Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea

Avatar
2 years ago

27. Mel-EpicReading

Yes!!!! Thank you! I thought I had responded earlier, but I don’t see it. Piranesi is exactly correct and I started over from the beginning because the mood is so enchanting!