What to Read Next?

Booklovers everywhere can find themselves vacillating between two poles: the pole called So Many Books, So Little Time – and the pole we could call Whatever Shall I Read Next That’s Going to Be As Wonderful as This Book I’ve Just Finished?

Our anxiety about finding a really good next read can cause us to forget that other readers have read - and loved – some really great books! And while there’s no accounting for taste when it comes to what you, specifically, might enjoy, another bibliophile’s fave can pan out to be one of yours.

The Internet, of course, is one source of reader recommendations. For example, you can find FlavorWire’s list of ten famous writers’ favorite books here. There are thousands of similar book lists on the Internet, which Mr. Google can help you find.

There are also plenty of books devoted to valorizing particular titles, such as the 2007 title whose cover is featured here. This book features summaries of 544 different titles cited by 125 different writers. A compilation of simiar book-recommening titles can be found sprinkled throughout the Atlanta Booklover’s Blog’s  ”Books about Books“ section. You don’t have to buy these books: you can borrow them from your local library.

Finally, there are databases available that try to identify books with similar locales, writing styles, time periods, etc. One of the best is NoveList, available  to anyone with an Atlanta-Fulton Public Library borrower’s card. (You’ll find a list of databases on the library system’s website.)

With all these resources – plus whatever you may have scribbled down onto (or input electronically into) your own personal TBA (To Be Read) list – we hope you’ll never have to wait too long between One Amazing Read and The Next One.

Confessions of Another Book Addict

Wherein we learn to our chagrin that a Google search on “book clutter” yields over 18,000 results.

Read Gabe Hash’s delightful blogpost at Publishers Weekly, “The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books.” Also enjoy the empathic comments from Hash’s readers, including those who mention that they’ve tried to at least partially replace their book-buying habits with book-borrowing (from their local public library).

Found via The New Yorker’s Book Bench

A Brief Sampling of Reading Recommendations from Shelf Awareness’s “Book Brahmins”

Alert readers will have noticed that one of this blog’s favorite sources of information is Shelf Awareness.

Not only does Shelf Awareness have its ear to the ground for recent developments in the great wide world of bookstores, but it regularly features one of the best resources we know of for garnering intriguing ideas for any avid reader’s Must-Read list.

“Book Brahmin” is what Shelf Awareness calls this treasure trove of interviews with various individuals in the printed story-telling business – mostly authors, famous and otherwise. What’s unique about this running series of interviews is that the set of questions is always the same, and many of those questions are satisfyingly specific about the interviewee’s favorite authors and books.

Taken together, the highly-regarded books and authors treasured by the interviewees constitutes a perfect Mother Lode of considered book recommendations.  And the other information included in these interviews – including the other questions and answers - are also consistently interesting, as are each interviewee’s remarks about why he/she regards a particular book or author so highly.

Hoping this feature might lead you to either sign up for the Shelf Awareness newsletter or to make the Shelf Awareness website one of your Internet Favorites, below is a sampling of what several selected questions in some of the most recent interviews revealed. You can check the website for its archive of additional “Book Brahmin” interviews.

Joseph Epstein (interview posted 11/30/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Leon Tolstoy Marcel Proust Willa Cather Max Beerbohm George Santayana	Italo Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno; Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard; Arlene Croce’s Dancing in the Dark
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Henry James’s                The Princess Casamassima	Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Lawrence Dorfman (interview posted 11/28/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Jim Harrison Tom McGuane Richard Price T.C. Boyle Stephen King	BOOK by Robert Grudin
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
God Bless You,                 Mr. Rosewater                  by Kurt Vonnegut	The Stand by Stephen King
Dennis Cooper (interview posted 11/18/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Of all time: Maurice Blanchot Arthur Rimbaud Alain Robbe-Grillet the Marquis de Sade Raymond Roussel Contemporary: John Ashbery David Foster Wallace Pierre Guyotat Steven Millhauser Gary Lutz	Agota Kristof’s trilogy          The Notebook / TheProof /   The Third Lie, known collectively as The Book of Lies
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Arthur Rimbaud’s               A Season in Hell	The Present and the Past       by Ivy Compton-Burnett
Jacqueline Carey (interview posted 11/16/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
For historical fiction: Mary Renault Robert Graves For modern literature: John Steinbeck For fantasy fiction: Guy Gavriel Kay For gritty contemporary novels: Dennis Lehane	The Horse of Selene by Juanita Casey
	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
	Little, Big by John Crowley
Paul Russell (interview posted 11/11/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Joyce Proust Mann Woolf Nabokov	Mark Merlis’s An Arrow’s Flight
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles; Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks; J.L. Carr’s   A Month in the Country; William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow	Finnegans Wake
Michael Cannell (interview posted 11/9/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Erik Larson Robert Caro Tom Wolfe David Halberstam Hampton Sides	Rules of Civility                    by Amor Towles
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Robert Capa: A Biography by Richard Whelan	Hemingway’s                       The Sun Also Rises
María Dueñas (interview posted 11/4/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
J.M. Coetzee    “…and 499 writers more”	The Corrections                    by Jonathan Franzen
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier	A World for Julius by Bryce Echenique
Mary Curran Hackett (interview posted 11/2/11)
“Top 5 Authors?”	“Book you’re an evangelist for?”
Dave Eggers Alice McDermott Colm Tóibín Charles Dickens Tobias Wolff	What Is the What                  by Dave Eggers
“Book that changed your life?”	“Book you most want to read again for the first time?”
Sharon Salzberg’s Faith	A Tale of Two Cities               by Charles Dickens

Hats off to Shelf Awareness for being so book reader-friendly with its carefully-crafted and extremely useful set of  ”Book Brahmin” questions. We predict you’ll find plenty of personal booklist fodder therein – especially if your reading tastes run to titles other than the ones that happen to constitute the current bestseller lists.

On Not Finishing Books You’ve Started to Read

Most booklovers probably fall into one of these camps: readers who would never dream of abandoning a book (even if it’s awful) before they’ve finished reading it, and those who do that very thing without a moment’s hesitation.

Here’s one biblioblogger’s speculations on why she just couldn’t finish a book beloved by millions of other readers.

Found at Book Riot

“Reading Retreats”

We can’t imagine any booklover not packing one or more books for every vacation he/she ends up taking, but one type of vacation we’ve never heard of before is the “reading retreat,” where book-reading is the entire point of the vacation.

The reading retreat is apparently not even a new idea, according to a description of several of them recently posted to Salon. (Be sure to click on the links to related stories at the end of the article.)

Other than the expense involved, the acknowledged flaw in the idea of a reading retreat – at least if the retreat is located in or near a distraction-filled area – is that the lure of these distractions could very well sabotage the undisciplined booklover’s original plans.

Nevertheless, something to think - or at least fantasize – about!

Found via Shelf Awareness

On Not Reading Franzen’s Latest Novel

One of our favorite bibliobloggers, Jessa Crispin (who edits Bookslut), recently explained why she refuses to read the latest U.S. Literary Sensation. An excerpt:

The idea that as a literary person there are a certain set of books you must read because they are important parts of the literary conversation is constantly implied, yet quite ridiculous. Once you get done with the Musts — the Franzens, Mitchells, Vollmanns, Roths, Shteyngarts — and then get through the Booker long list, and the same half-dozen memoirs everyone else is reading this year (crack addiction and face blindness seem incredibly important this year), you have time for maybe two quirky choices, if you are a hardcore reader. Or a critic. And then congratulations, you have had the same conversations as everyone else in the literary world.Hamlet versus King Lear versus Julius Caesar and never have a clear winner. There are celebrity issues with the must-reads, which few people acknowledge. I noticed this when I started rooting around in Hungarian literature, and none of the writers there would be considered Musts. Is it because Hungary has never produced a Flaubert? Never created a character as compelling or universal as Emma Bovary? Or simply because politics and celebrity and chance keep some people in the shadows and other people filling the entire spotlight with their bloated corpus. One of my favorite novels is Hungarian, which started this in the first place. But without similarly passionate people sifting through a nation’s literary output, like record labels’ signing every fashionably crap band in Seattle in the wake of Nirvana, we can make assumptions about the lack of quality Hungarian literature. Or literature by women. Or literature printed by small presses or self-published or printed online.

Of course there is no such thing as a must-read book. Maybe you should read some Tolstoy, but then again maybe not, if overly long descriptions of fields don’t really do anything for you, or if you have some problems with the whole woman-has-a-desire-and-so-must-die thing. Maybe you should check out some Jane Austen, but then again, Jane Austen is pretty boring and the whole marriage-as-life thing, I mean who really cares. There is Shakespeare, but you could spend a day arguing

There is no such thing as a canon — what you should read or want to read or will read out of obligation is determined as much by your history, your loves, and your daily reality as by the objective merits of certain works.

Crispin’s entire screed on this subject is worth a look.

Found at The Smart Set

Too Many Books, Too Little Time

Another meditation on the booklover’s perennial dilemma, this one from The Book Bench, the New Yorker’s book blog. The essay’s author is responding to another essay on a related subject that was recently posted to another biblioblog, The Millions.

The Sobering Mathematics of Reading

Most of us like to assume otherwise, but the fact of the matter is that the number of books any person can read is pathetically small compared to the number of books available.

Canadian author and Bookninja blogger George Murray recently reminded his readers of the dreary mathematical quandry faced by all avid readers:

“How many books can you read in a week, or a month? If you’re judging the Booker prize you probably have to slog through a novel a day, but most people would do well to finish a novel a week. That’s about four a month, or perhaps 40 a year (allowing for holidays). So, even if you throw in a few extras, the average reader will have done well to consume 50 new titles a year, probably many fewer. Yes, there’s an astounding amount of choice and novelty out there, but we are unlikely to explore it, however much we might want to. We simply do not have the time, or perhaps the energy, to fully exploit the contemporary cornucopia of print.”

Although George was making this point with respect to the controversy on whether or not electronic books will be Good For Readers, we think it’s actually a periodically-needed reminder that we might consider being a bit more choosey in selecting the books we decide to spend time with.

Does It Matter What We Read?

Novelist/teacher/reader Sonya Chung is upset about an article in a recent New Yorker about the spectacular popularity of romance writer Nora Roberts, and the article’s  implication that the popularity of Roberts’ books somehow makes them (or makes genre fiction in general) interchangeable with well-written literary fiction.

Not so, says Chung:

With its obligatory happy endings, strict conventions, formula elements, and, above all, comforting predictability, genre fiction will always garner a wider audience than literary fiction. Which is another way of saying that more people buy books and spend time with the words in them to evade the (messy, complicated) world as it is than to see it more truly – in all its mystery, pain, complexity, and beauty. Resistance – perhaps opposition is not too strong a word – to genre fiction for a writer and reader of literary fiction is, in my opinion, a literary ecosystem imperative….

…Life is tough, we all seek ways to effectively distract and soothe ourselves. Consume your genre series with gusto and pleasure, like a drippy, juicy bacon burger; kick back and let them carry you away weightlessly, like an after-midnight Wii session. But do not imagine or attempt to argue that they play a vital role in augmenting the human experience.

Chung’s thought-provoking diatribe is worth reading in its entirety – especially for her recommendations for a half-dozen books that Chung feels ”bring together the strengths of both the genre and literary forms: suspense, sexual tension, absorbing dialogue, compelling plots, characters you come to love like your favorite pets; and fresh and inventive language, complex characterization, settings you can taste touch and smell, consequential ideas, ambiguity and surprise and mystery.”

Found via The Millions

Bookish Quote of the Day

“It should aways be borne in mind that the busiest reader must leave unread all but a mere fraction of the good books in the world….The reading of a book a fortnight, or say twenty-five books a year, is quite as much as the average reader can possibly achieve – a rate at which only 1,250 books could be read in half a century. Since this is so, he must be very thoughtless and very timid who feels any shame in confessing that he is wholly ignorant of a great many books; and on the other hand, none but a very superficial and conceited reader will venture to express surprise at the deficiencies of others, when a little thought would make his own so clearly manifest.” – Charles F. Richardson (The Choice of Books, 1885)