A good friend of mine gave me a wonderful gift of a book voucher. A fantasic gift and very in-line with how I enjoy spending my time. But the gift came with a note….
“break out of the mold and find something unique!”
Queue a crisis of introspection.
What was my mold? I pondered. What is unique?
For the last years, I have been reading a lot more and trying to read 52 books in a year. It’s been challenging, life affirming and fun all at once. But being faced with this new instruction I faced some home truths.
While reading a lot more, I know that I have certain preferences. I enjoy history, especially relating to ancient history and within that category, particular emphasis on the Roman Republic and Ancient Greece. I am also a political nerd, with an interest in market economics. As a treat, I enjoy a bit of fantasy, especially stories I may have started in my childhood.
But was there more to this that I could understand to help me decipher the note in front of me?
I jumped onto my GoodReads to analyse my last three years of books to try and inform this process. I sorted books by rough categories:
- History (including strictly historical fiction) takes out the top spot with 45 total (and some potential add in’s like “The Duke and I” which I decided wasn’t dominantly historical but this could be an anomaly I should fix. Non-fiction history was at 23 and historical fiction was at 22. Also noting here that I didn’t include the Trials of Apollo books here and chose instead to add them into the fantasy category. Bear with me, there is overlap.
- Politics and Economics (I am not an economist so much of my economics thinking loops into political thought, so despite some books not being political they inform my political thinking which is quite broad) comes in at 43 books, this takes into account any biography of a political figure as well and has someclear overlap with my history category. These teo largely show the dominant space of my reading.
- Fantasy comes in third and is also a fairly wide category. It is pumped up a bit by last year’s decision to plough through the final books of a series I began as a child. This may reduce over the coming year.
- Philosophy and Psychology, yes they’re different, but I put people like Haidt and Harari here. This category has 18 books.
- Other fiction is at 9 books
- Science at 8 books, some argument over some of the Psychology entries though.
- Finally, Other Biography comes in at 7.
So there useful takeaways are that in my search for a book I should almost certainly avoid anything overtly political or grounded in history I regularly read. Fantasy should probably be looked at with suspicion as to whether a book could truly meet the test. Philosophy and Psychology could get a look in, but it would probably have to avoid my regular entries themes.
The obvious places to start my hunt, to me seems in the sciences and non-historical fiction categories.
Then the next layer of the thought process kicks in. I rarely read physical books and use e-books and audiobooks a lot (though I have been working on expanding the number I do read). When I buy a new physical book it has often been for a particular reason. I purchased a copy of Clanlands: Whisky, Warfare, and a Scottish Adventure Like No Other when I was at a talk by one of the authors and I purchased a hardback copy of Margaret Thatcher’s memoirs to upgrade by soft-cover copy. Buying a new physical book needs some thought and research.
A third, but related, thought, is that this is a gift from an important person in my life. I don’t just want to go into a bookshop and purchase any non-confirming book to my usual reading patterns. What if I don’t like it? That would undermine the meaning I have attached to the gifting process.
I have now been trapped with these thoughts for a while and realised that I was having quite a lot of fun with it.
The process of looking into the data about my own habits has been interesting and has led me to appreciate the need to keep up the struggle to find and engage with new ideas.
The process has also been fun to try and find a unique book. Recently being out of town, I have endevoured to search bookshops in Wanaka, Frankton and Queenstown assessing potential options (I even purchased a copy of Madeline Albright’s memoirs!).
My leaning to date is that I need to properly look at some of the science books out there. It seems odd to me that I haven’t read more in this field and shows a gap in knowledge.
Another friend also pointed me towards noir-fiction, a sub genre of the crime genre. This sounded appealing, so I looked into it. Promptly I fell down the rabbit-hole of the sub-genres of Nordic noir.
The search continues.
