Around 2.2 million books are published every year, and the sheer number of options may result in readers experiencing choice overload. Faced with too many choices, we often spend so much time selecting the “best” book that we miss actually reading one.
Realizing that we consume hours, even days, picking the next title to read feels so much like a waste. It’s not wise. Since life is short, we might as well make the best of our remaining hours getting down to business.
Wondering how to shorten your decision-making process and quickly discover books worth reading? You may want to ask these four questions and see if they’re effective (like they did for me)!
1. How Are You Feeling Today?
Asking yourself how you feel at a given moment may work like a double-edged sword: it will help you pick the perfect book and also aid you in sorting out your emotions. However, doing this can be challenging if you often can’t describe your feelings. When I was younger I’d ask myself this question and often drew a blank.
Recently, and fortunately, drawing a blank is a rarity, because I don’t need to label emotions with big names anymore. We can simply say we’re “sad,” and that’s enough ground to work on. Interestingly, it’s those plain answers that will allow us to explore our inner selves more deeply because such a simple statement begs for a long chain of follow-up questions!
Here are some samples of how I do this step:
- If I don’t feel anything, I’ll ask myself “What do I want to feel?” and then find a book that might elicit a certain emotion.
- If I’m down, I’ll ask myself “What can uplift me?” then relate the answers to the books on my shelf and phone, and voila, there’s a title that fits!
2. What Do You Want To Learn?
If you don’t want to channel your emotions, then tap your intellectual curiosity instead. Look for books that will teach you something. Maybe you watched Shogun and wondered how accurate the production’s depiction of feudal Japan was. Or maybe you’re sick of drawing stick figures and want to learn how to draw better.
A Google search or a walk around a shop can point you to a book you need to satiate your desire for learning. It’s rare not to find a book about a subject, what with a million or so titles published annually!
As for me, I refer to a list of “things I want to learn in my free time.” It’s the existence of this nerdy, geeky list that I bought a book about classical music, intensive journaling, and Andres Bonifacio. It’s because of this list that I have a book about learning how to read literature like a professor, even if I’m no teacher.
I know that I can’t always pull a book instantly when curiosity strikes. In such instances, I turn to Google, search the internet for immediate answers, and then look for books that match my interest at the moment. I will buy my preferred titles from bookshops or online stores or visit local book fairs (to save money). For obscure titles, I check the Internet Archive or order overseas. Nothing can inspire me to read the book more effectively than the fact that I put real effort into acquiring it.
3. What Do You Want To See?
Books provide glimpses of lives and worlds that one might never encounter and experience in this lifetime. Writers conjure morally grey protagonists, multi-layered villains, and despicable authority figures. They draw pictures of gruesome war zones, cozy homes, terrifying cities, and whimsical train stations. We know these characters and visit these scenarios so easily, sometimes becoming so immersed we feel like we are part of those stories.
We can take advantage of this easy access to various scenes to determine which book to read next. When the day is bad, and you might want to see beauty or the simplicity of life, I recommend reading light-hearted Japanese novels about cats and cat owners or a fluffy, low-stakes manga series.
When the day is too good, you might want to ground yourself by reading about human experiences, and that’s when it’s best to read biographies, memoirs, or psychology-related anthologies. Try to pick titles now and then that will encourage a perspective shift; our aim in reading is to broaden our horizons and be more aware of things we might be ignorant about prior. To learn is to understand, and to understand is to make us wiser and more compassionate.
4. What Do You Want To Be?
Books have a profound effect on people, especially on children. When I was a kid, my mom read us “Hansel and Gretel” and I remember how I felt sorry for the siblings left in the wild, amazed by the house made of edible sweets, and impressed when they defended themselves from the witch who wanted to eat them. Little me aspired to be as brave and agile as those children, lest I become part of a villain’s dinner menu.
The impact of books stays strong in adulthood, but this time, you can control what books are influential based on what you want to be. It’s not like we stopped aspiring to become a certain way when we grew older, only that our desires may be more abstract now; when we were young we might have said we wanted to be heroes, but now that we’re older we’d prefer to embody the qualities of a hero, say, to be kind, courageous, and strong.
Fortunately, there are plenty of books that can help shape us into the person we want to be, from self-help titles to autobiographies to novels. These books can inspire us, teach us, or warn us on what to do and not to do to realize our visions for ourselves. The key is to be intentional in choosing the book you pick up next — ensure you’re reading something that contributes to your goal.
The Wrap Up
Deciding which book to read next is simple. If you set your targets first and ask the right questions, you can decide which title to pick up more quickly and spend more time actually reading.
There is joy in hunting books, yes. That said, we all probably agree that real bliss comes in flipping the pages and making it to the end of a good read.
