What Am I Going to Read Next?

As I write these words I am sitting next to a bookcase crammed full of volumes.

I think of this as my “possibility bookcase,” as in, I might possibly soon read the books that I have filed and stacked on its shelves. These are books that I have moved up from the larger library that my wife Erin and I have accumulated from lifetimes of reading, book collecting, and working in bookstores. My “theory” is that if I keep them next to me while I am sitting at my desk, I will feel either inspired or made guilty by their unread presence, and get to them sooner or later.

“So what are you going to read next?” Erin and I ask one another when we observe that the other is coming to the end of a book. We grimace and say, “Well, I’ve got a couple of titles in mind,” and then reel off five or six titles as beads of sweat form on our foreheads. That is only a slight exaggeration.

Option paralysis is truly a First World Problem, but it’s nevertheless a problem. So here’s a bunch of questions to paralyze you: How do you follow the mystical thread from one book to the next? Do you read another book by the same author, if you’re digging them? Or do you completely change gears and opt for another voice? Are you following thematic or subject threads? Do you rely on recommendations from other readers? Are you a spontaneous reader who just grabs whatever appeals to you at the moment?

Like many of you out there, I would answer “yes” to all of the above questions, though I might be less inclined to answer in the affirmative to the last question. I am not a very spontaneous person, and that goes double for my reading. I like to plan out what I am going to read next, I like to weigh the options until I hit the just right book on the mystical reading thread. Or at least that’s my hope.

An example of how I go about this process is where I’m at right now. I am currently reading James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (much more about this in a future post) and am just about finished with that doorstop. I’ll probably finish it tonight. It’s taken me about three and a half weeks to read (it’s eight hundred twenty pages long) and in that time I’ve been riveted by it despite its many flaws. I’m fully invested in the characters and their fates, I am immersed in the sultry Hawaiian weather of its setting, and I am feeling a deepening dread as I know that the attack on Pearl Harbor is coming (spoiler alert: it happens, and it’s the best writing in the book). Anyway, I really love this book, even if it is not exactly a great novel. I will miss From Here to Eternity, we’ve been living with each other for quite a while now.

So where do I go next? One part of me wants to read more World War II novels, such as Norman Mailer’s Naked and the Dead (that would be a re-read), or maybe I’ll finally get all the way through Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 this time, or maybe I should go on a James Jones kick and read his combat novel of the Guadalcanal campaign, The Thin Red Line (it’s on the shelves downstairs). Maybe I’ll read them all, or none of them. And even if I do, it will probably be a better idea to read a different author next, with a different voice and different subject, as a sort of literary palate cleanser. Well, hopefully it will be more than that. And then of course, I could also read a biography or something else non-fiction as I mourn the absence of the From Here to Eternity Characters from my life…or maybe…or maybe…or maybe…

To Be Continued…