How I choose what to read next

I can tell this photo of our bookshelf is old, because we have more books now and our framed photos are different.  Isn't it funny how an old photo of a bookshelf is almost like a scrapbook?

I love the moment when I get to pick out a new book.  I do it kinesthetically, by making a stack. Usually I have a mental list, but it changes.  And I usually have more than one book going at a time, so there's a certain undefined number of them that I have to finish in order to allow myself the privilege of making a new stack.

Yesterday was one of those "make the stack" moments, though.  I've finished my biography of Jonathan Edwards, and I finished a nice little light book by Anne Fadiman (Ex Libris) that indulged my eccentricity. So it was just the right moment to wallow in books.

Though my shelving system is eccentric, I usually know where my books are.  First I went to the bedroom to fetch The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I plan to read this one mostly in the mornings along with my Bible.  

Then I climbed up on one of the chairs and started taking books down off the classical shelf (5C--our shelving system is modeled after our apartment building, with floors and units).  When Bob came into the room, I was standing in my socks on a narrow ledge, holding a volume of Plutarch in one hand and Alfred the Great in the other.  They both made the trip down with me.  They are both of a good subway book size and weight.  

Then I remembered that I'd been meaning to read David McCullough's 1776 for forever.  Someone had given us a deluxe version, a slip-covered coffee-table book with facsimile documents in vellum envelopes.  It's really fun to look through all the documents, but unfortunately, the sheer size of the book has probably kept me from ever seriously trying to read it.  So yesterday I moved it from the shelf to the coffee table, which we didn't even have when I got the book.  

On the way back down to the chair, I spied Theodore Roosevelt's Letters to His Children lying sideways on top of the other books in the "history/mostly source material" shelf (2B), because I'd run out of room on that shelf.  Oh, that too!  I grabbed it.  (Grabbing books while pivoting to step down, in sock feet, from a narrow wooden ledge is not something I'd recommend, but this time I got away with it.)  

So there's my little stack.  I'm in a history mood.  And I also have David Hicks' Norms and Nobility going, but I forgot to include it in the photo above. I'm not sure I'll read every one of the books in the stack, but they're easy to get to now, and I started three of them (Bonhoeffer, Plutarch, and Teddy Roosevelt) today.  They're very different books, for different situations, so I'll likely enjoy all three.  

In addition to the stacks, I have another informal rule for choosing books.  I try, somehow, to loosely rotate lighter books with more challenging ones, and fiction with non-fiction.  Non-fiction usually wins out overall, but I'm trying to balance them more than I once did.  And of course, some days I'll just pick up a cookbook or a reference book and spend a couple of hours perusing that.  

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So what are the Shakespeare books doing in the photo? Those are Bob's books.  

Bob is a completely different sort of book chooser than I am.  He is very goal-oriented.  He plans out his reading, often down to the number of pages per day, several books in advance, and then works methodically through his own plan.  In addition, he reads every issue of The New Criterion, cover to cover, before the next issue arrives.  He gets through some very difficult books this way, like N.T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God, or the Landmark Herodotus.  (He got the idea for reading the latter from The New Criterion, which is a hazard of reading that magazine.)  He got through vet school and law school this way, too.  

Right now he has Shakespeare at the top of his stack, because Shakespeare in the Park season is coming up, and he dutifully assigns himself each play before we go see it.  This year the plays are The Merchant of Venice and The Winter's Tale.  

Will I get around to reading Shakespeare?  I don't know--I am, honestly, a flittier reader than Bob is.  But I get through a lot, I challenge myself, and I bond with my books.  (I have my own system of margin notes and underlining.)  I think we each have each found a method of reading that suits us.