How do you decide what to read?

I am not entirely sure how I wound up with the books on my bookshelf. I noticed recently that I tend to lose books I love, because once I have read them I give them away. I don’t own a copy of The Beetle, for example, a book I have bought time and time again. A book I credit for getting me back into reading, but I never seem to own it long because I always want someone else to read it. It is a very silly book. Published under the Penguin classics label, the blurb details that the Beetle ‘outsold Dracula!’ It’s a fairly conventional epistolary horror of the mid-1800s, that doesn’t have the inventiveness or eloquence of something like Frankenstein or Dracula. I mean, compare those words to ‘The Beetle’. Strikes fear into your heart doesn’t it? I love that stupid book.

The Beetle, by Richard Marsh. (Who wouldn’t buy this book?)

In school, you are guided towards reading certain things. Required readings, curriculum. Perhaps you’re in a different English class to your friend, they read Macbeth, you read Romeo and Juliet (You now have very different opinions on marriage) What else are you reading? As a teenager, you have a bit more agency. But there are books that you are guided towards, Young Adult staples that everyone has read, books your parents want you to read because they read them at that time in their life. The kind of books that should make you want to read. Sadly for me, I didn’t read much after school, in University I never felt I had the time. But now, more than ever, I know I can make time.

My New Year’s resolution last year was simply: Read More. The best possible resolution, very difficult to fail. When I got to December, and I remembered that resolution, I looked at my goodreads, and I did. I did read more. That felt great. This year, it is to precisely read 12 books. A healthy goal I suspect, one per month. I read more than that last year, but I had more time, and the vague goal of Reading More to drive me. I wonder if making it a concrete figure will doom me.

Now that I have decided that I want to read, we come back to the question. How do you decide what to read?

I gave up on a lot of books last year. I don’t think that this is a fault in my decision making process, but it has made me curious about that of others. So, I thought I would walk through how I decide the sort of books I would read.

I read mostly based upon recommendation. Friends will lend or gift me books, which is always nice. I have a few with dedications in them. My friend Arlo gave me Hil Malatino’s Trans Care for my birthday, and I found it very reassuring. I have since lent my copy, and bought the book anew for others. T4T. Sometimes I am at a bookshop and I come across something I have heard of, or that the seller would recommend to me. I picked up The Cyberiad, one of my favourite books, because I recognised the author Stanislaw Lem, as the author of Solaris. When I brought the book to the counter, the shops owner told me with great excitement that it was one of his favourite books. It was a nice book to buy. I think that when I first started wanting to read again, that I should read the classics. Hence my buying of The Beetle, the highlight reel of the penguin classics collection. I enjoyed the few that I read, I loved Little Women, but I realised both that I am missing out on a lot of wonderful modern literature, and what am I trying to prove? These things take time. I was part of a book club earlier last year, we managed one book and I have a romanticised memory of my time reading it. In July, I was working as an artist’s sole assistant on a shoot, when he needed some time to plan how we would shoot in the afternoon, I was sent away for lunch. We were working out of his office in the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop and I finished Bright Lights, Big City on the balcony, overlooking a sunny cyclepath in Leith. As I closed the copy, the artist came out to call for me. “We’re back on.”

The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.

Again, we managed one book as part of this book club, and I am largely responsible for not completing book two. The guilt racks me to this day.

Do you give up on books? If so, why not?

I am not quick to come to my conclusions and it is always a different reason each time. Here are some books I stopped reading last year, and why. I gave up on Kafka’s The Trial because I read the introduction and the added context made me find Kafka annoying. I read too much of his personal life into the book and thought it would’ve been much stronger without. I was most of the way through Baldwin’s Another Country, which I loved, but I began work on a number of projects and simply lost track of the story. I hope to come back to it from the beginning sometime. I was halfway through A Little Life and I was really enjoying it, for all the talk I had heard about it being unnecessarily torturing of it’s lead, I felt that the most moving parts of the book were how you saw everyone surrounding Jude wanting the best for him, it is how they really desperately care for their friend who cannot understand why. I was with it until Jude enters into an abusive relationship, at which point I found his internal narration too close to home. It made me believe that I could feel that way again, and I couldn’t read any more. I am currently reading a book called Ice, by Anna Kavan, but I think I shall stop.

Most of these books I hope to return to when the time is right, and I do believe that it is about timing. I am writing this piece as a form of exercising these failures from myself. I believe entirely that it is worthwhile to pause or to abandon books, yet, part of me feels a sense of shame about it, that it is a failure. But why would I force myself to read something when I know I am not going to get anything out of it? Whenever I try to pick a book back up I have abandoned, I immediately understand why I left it in the first place. I think this year, I shall not try to force myself to keep reading, but rather to make these decisions faster, so that I can read more that I am throughly enjoying.

I set out to create something interactive in this piece. At first I thought this would be too dull to make an article, but the more I thought about it, I realised that I would like to know how other people have wound up with their bookshelves, or how they think about what they want to read. So, if you have the time for a sentence or so. I would like to know. Tell me about a book that you have abandoned, or why you don’t? How do you decide what to read?

——————————————————

*Edit: An Instagram Poll asking readers whether they abandoned books or not, was posted to the Unlaced account in January of 2024.

The responses were split 50/50.