📚 On Reading
I've recently been thinking about how little personal book reading I've been doing, but on further reflection that's not fair to me. I started reading the Harry Potter series to our family this year and we're now over halfway through The Halfblood Prince. I'm reading a chapter aloud most nights as all of our schedules allow.
Before Covid, I did a pretty good job of tracking my yearly book reading habits, but that practice fell off at a certain point. I'd like to get back to it though, it seems like a good ongoing or end-of-year blog post kind of thing. And I'd like to go back and track down the past reading lists I do have and put them on here.
On a related note, today I stumbled upon a guy in Australia, Russell Marks, who has completely computerized how he selects his next reading decision:
A homemade algorithm chooses every book I read
Now I talk about it all the time. "But what if you're not in the mood to read a book the spreadsheet selects?" I get asked by friends, who, not unreasonably I suppose, consume culture on the basis of how they feel at the time. They see only severe restrictions on my agency. But I see the document as a kind of literary welfare state or spreadsheet university, expanding the sphere of my literary freedom. I'm naturally bad at making choices. I say I want to read loads of things, but in the moment a choice needs to be made I find it debilitating. If my choice of reading material were entirely my own, I'd probably just pick up another John Grisham novel. (I have much the same problem with Netflix and Stan, and end up watching Blue Heelers.) Yet in the 15 years Bill Gates's creation has done the choosing for me, I've read wonderful books I never would otherwise have opened. The spreadsheet has also allowed me to begin to address my startling lack of reading diversity. The proportion of books I read by women has increased 6 percentage points since mid 2013, and those by authors of colour has increased fourfold.
This would never work for me. A master list is a good idea, but I want to be able to follow my whims and latest interests. Additionally, I try to get the most of my reading material via the library when possible, and that means delays on accessing some books when I'm ready to read them. I applaud Marks's logic and ingenuity though. Thinking about the last sentence of his quote I'm pretty sure that I've only read books by women this year (11 books, three different authors).