For the good part of my adult years, I have been a reader, albeit not always as keen as I have been in the last 3 years, which I have covid to thank for that. At least something good came out of the agony.
An exciting part of reading for me is actually buying books, building lists of what I would like to read, shopping for those books which I rarely do online because it takes away an important element of the whole reading experience in my point of view. Over the last few years, I built a theory about my “Unread” bookshelf. I have discovered that a lot of my appetite for reading comes from that specific moment you look at the unread bookshelf and pick a book to read from there. You never know what the calling in your head is craving at that point in time, so your shelf better be ready to offer what the mind craves.
Now that’s all good and well but it’s also endless if you think about. Many genres, topics, authors, there is a lot more to read than I am capable off from a time perspective so how do you actually fill out that unread bookshelf. I am going to outline my process here and you can use this to try and come up with one that fits you.
For starters you need to list out the fields, genres and topics you like to read about for me it’s the following:
- Non-fiction business, technology & psychology
- Historic fiction (English & Arabic)
- Romantic fiction (English & Arabic)
- Memoirs & autobiographies
- Investigative journalism (English & Arabic)
- History (English & Arabic)
You may think that this is a lot, but you assure I have left out massive domains of books that are also very valuable, but I have no appetite for them, or they just rank lower in terms of priority. You must learn to accept the fact that in your lifetime you are not going to be able to read everything you want to read. To give you a view I left out crime, sci-fiction, self-help, thrillers, poetry, fairytale, mysteries, horror, graphic novels and I am sure a lot more if you decide to delve into subcategories. I am not with the notion that book genres can be summarized into 5 or 7 or whatever number that’s being used these days.
Once you have identified this list, you need to fill your unread bookshelf with 3 or 4 of every type, but not just any books. The 3 or 4 books within the genre should offer you a selection that fits that craving. In my list above I always aim to have the following:
- Different size from a number of pages point of view. You must not always feel guilty reading a book with smaller number of pages, every mood and time has its calling.
- Different issuing year, some are recent some are older. The world changes so fast which reflects on the perspectives of the authors. Reading only the most recent books denies you the historic point of view on topics which then guides how the most recent forms of opinions and positions have been formed.
- Different background of authors, women, men, European, American, Arab, Latin etc. Every culture, gender and upbringing will give you a different angle on the topic, different challenges which you may or may not relate to but remaining constrained to one side of a story narrows the benefits you get from reading.
Finally, which books to actually select. There are two tracks I pursuit in choosing books.
First track, looking at book reviews. For starters I would like to tell you I do not read or write book reviews I only give and read star ratings to books. A rating from 1 star to 5 is all what I would like to offer a book I have read, and that’s also all I would like to consume about somebody else’s view of a book.
Plenty of sources where you can find those ratings, Amazon, good reads and others. To be frank if a book has a rating of 3 and above that’s usually for me good enough to consider, I get skeptical with books that have 1 or 2 star rating not because I have that deep trust in the rating system, but because as I mentioned earlier there isn’t enough time to read everything I want to read, so if there is a slight indication that a book will turn out a disaster then any heads up to avoid that I do appreciate.
Second track, lists compiled by magazines, newspapers, recommendation lists that come out from famous people like Bill Gates, Barack Obama & Oprah Winfrey. Problem with lists is that they capture the most recent books and miss out on books for example published 20 years ago, unless obviously you decide to track down those lists from all the past years which is technically doable but rather time consuming. The twitter reading community is pretty large, check the hashtags and you will find ton of recommendations. Facebook groups as well come in handy, there are several groups specially for Arabic books that I follow that have proven to be a great source of recommendations.
If you come across this article and would like to follow me on good reads to see what I have read, currently reading or wish to read, here is a link to my good reads account, until someone out there cares enough to give the reading community a more advanced app.
https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/121166988
Happy reading!
