Hi, I’m Baņuta, and welcome all ye bookish.. My New Year’s resolution in 2022 was to read a hundred books. I finished Number 100 a few days ago. It was a goal born of Omicron. Remember how in January, it looked like we were all being sent back indoors? I had time on my hands and to those hands I added books. I resolved to read fifty pages a day, or at least twenty silent minutes.
I set up a couple of rules. For one thing, I was going to read for free. Those hundred books had to come from the library. Also, so that reading wouldn’t become a chore, I was allowed to drop a book at any time. At first I intended to read fifty pages before I gave up. Then, at least ten pages. Now I’m down to one sentence. “Call me Ishmael,” and we’re through.
The biggest mystery was how to concoct the reading list. Though the Toronto Public Library is a haven for the homeless and the aimless, during the pandemic, strict limits were placed on masked attendance. I wasn’t going to wander through book racks looking for that hidden gem.
And anyway, browsing through physical stacks is so twentieth century. These days the library gives you your own online account, and I could order books from any branch across the city, shipped to me by a careful librarian. But still — how was I going to choose them? I needed a method.
As a young girl, I dreamed of reading every book in the neighbourhood library. One summer, I started at the letter A and attempted every tenth book. Luckily it was a small library. I quit before I got to Balzac. I still blanch at the thought of Louis Auchincloss. This time, in 2022, I knew better than to goose-step through the alphabet. Instead, I needed some loopy, aleatoric way to keep my reading unpredictable.
I decided to note down any book anyone recommended, as long as it wasn’t something I'd already read (like Das Kapital), or something I never wanted to read (Moby Dick), or something too turgid (Das Kapital), or something too silly (My Little Pony). Collecting titles became a minor obsession. I culled the ‘best of’ lists on Twitter. I sucked up books from footnotes, books name-dropped in other books. I collected suggestions from authors promoting their publications in the Sunday New York Times. Even if I didn’t think I would be interested in LBJ or the opium wars of China, I put the book on the list. I wanted to give every book a chance.
The library site had a feature called Saved. There my list grew. Soon it ballooned into a number I could never erase, like the balance on a credit card. You can save as many books as you like, the library site warned me gently, but we won’t display more than two thousand. I was nearing that number and I couldn’t risk losing my precious collection. So I printed out the first batch of titles, twenty-one gray spreadsheet pages.
All those titles became part of a lottery. The game was on.
This is how it worked.
The Surprise Me Method
The goal is to order ten books from the library every month. Not all books will be read, but all will be looked at. The ten are assembled according to these rules:
1. The first title comes from the last page of the spreadsheet, which are the earliest titles I collected.
2. The next title is the second most recent book I’ve saved. The second most recent because the first is too obvious? Who makes the rules here?
3. One to two selections are by A Featured Author. I decided to read everything by Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell, because I loved her book Hamnet. I also tackled Iris Murdoch, but my enthusiasm flagged and I stopped altogether when a friend, sounding aghast, asked why on earth was I trying to read all of Murdoch? Currently I’m reading my way through Percival Everett. His Telephone was one of my favourite books last year. He has written thirty novels, most of them short. I will keep reading him in 2023.
4. The remaining title come from those gray spreadsheet pages of Saved titles. I’ll choose one title from the top of a page and one from the bottom until I get to ten. It’s the closest thing to a lottery. I order those ten from the library and look forward to lugging them home.
Not all of those one hundred books I read were chosen by this method. Some books jumped the line. When a friend waxed rhapsodic about When we cease to understand the world by Benjamin Labatut, I squeezed it in. When a younger friend wondered how I could not know Sam Pink, I picked him up. I’m writing about World War II, and so books about that era jostle my randomized choices aside. I have read more than a normal person’s share about the Holocaust, prisoner-of-war camps, silenced trauma.
Some time soon I’ll write a post about my top choices from that hundred. In the meantime, here are the ten titles I’m reading in December 2022, chosen via the Surprise Me method.
From the last page of the list: Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (essays, 2019)
Featured Author: Percival Everett, Big Picture (Stories. I had to buy this one on Kindle because the library didn't have it)
Second-most-recent saved book: Benito Perez Galdos, Tristana (Spanish novel, nineteenth century, never heard of the author though he’s famous)
Top and bottom of printed spreadsheet pages:
William Maxwell, All the days and nights: the collected stories of William Maxwell (I don’t know this author, do you?)
Michael Connelly, The Black Ice (detective novel, not my favorite genre)
Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place (a 1982 classic which I might have read)
Svetlana Alexeievich, Secondhand-Time: the last of the Soviets (I love her; can’t wait!)
George Bowering, Soft Zipper: objects, food, rooms (memoir about British Columbia, recently published — 2021 — and with an introduction by Lisa Robertson whom I very much admire)
Mark Hennick, So-called normal : a memoir of family, depression and resilience (also 2021, book about near suicide)
Daniel Mason , A Registry of my Passage on the Earth (stories, know nothing about it, published in 2020)
Just love this. So looking forward to how the reading goes! And very curious to know if Knausgaard is on your list.