Goal: develop a specific set of practices, based on your goals, and experiment with applying them to how you read…

First: free write a bit, trying to articulate your reading goals…do you want to read more in general? learn about a particular thing? social goals around reading? etc.

What reading habits, practices, or methods do you find most interesting / potentially useful?

Pick a direction to explore…

And think about some practices that might help you attain them — these can be large or small, ideally granular and easy to try! Unique and personal = even better :)

For example…

Ways of tracking your reading: daily? monthly? numeric or vibes? types of goals? are stats useful? habits etc.

Ways of sharing what you read: social media? texting friends? writing blog posts?

What to read next? random? from a list? based on social context like a book club?

How / when to abandon a book? 100 pages in? whenever the vibes are off?

List triage strategies?

Bookmarking methods?

Social reading experiments?

You may decide to borrow more from the process, and install Libby to make that easier.

You may come up with a regular routine for periodically culling your "want to read" list, or reading multiple books in parallel.

Select two books you own — one you love and want to re-read more intentionally, and one you find interesting but would rather…not read. Let's explore how to approach both cases.

How to (re)read a favorite book:

What might be an interesting lens or approach? Perhaps…

Read it in a special place, like in a park or on vacation

Read it together with a loved one (a tiny book club)

Read it while taking notes and live-posting / blogging thoughts

See also: what book would you "centiread"? below!

How to (not) read a book:

If you have a book you find fascinating but would rather intentionally shelve in your antilibrary, you might…

Spend some time reading several reviews of the book

Ask if any friends have read it, and what they thought

Based on an earlier essay on the topography of my own reading!

We start with a thought experiment, an attempt to visualize your reading as a landscape, a map.

Taking known books as known territory, antilibrary as distant periphery, and unknown infinite library beyond, what path do you take through this landscape over time?

There's no singular definition of good or correct reading; the answer to "what should I read?" is highly contextual and changes over time. There are "good" books you shouldn't read now, and "worse" books that fit the moment, that fill an immediate need.

So, we can ascend a ladder of reading goals from the basic "read more books" to the slightly refined "read better books" to the more nuanced "read the best books at the right time, in the right way, for you…"

Another way of thinking about this: taking a syntopical approach — growing reading networks — writ personal.

To extend the topographical metaphor, we could start by clustering books by genre or other category, mapping their relationships. But I'm more interested in my own paths, and the sorts of unexpected clusters or sequences that I might identify from how I actually traverse the landscape.

From an earlier note to myself:

A general metaphor might be the little chart on a treadmill indicating incline angle as "hills" you're climbing, or the elevation chart that accompanies a trail guide for a hike. Translating this to our reading pace and overall patterns can help for visualizing things like "this week I need to take it easy and have fun, but I'll intersperse this novel with occasional chapters of a challenging book I want to finish", or "this month I'm prepping for a big project and need to read a bunch of dense books all on one subject but after that I'll palate cleanse with some fun stuff I've been meaning to get to"…and so on!

This may be useful with both retrospective and anticipatory framing:

Retrospective: look at my reading for past years, plot out the paths traced, identify the contours…how did I interleave fiction and nonfiction? Fun books and challenging ones? Clusters of topics?

Anticipatory: are there goals for what and how I'd like to read that might benefit from being visualized and plotted in advance?

For example looking at my "next ten books" list from a couple months back, I identified (mostly) a mix of classic novels, books on libraries and knowledge and education, books by women, and speculative meta-books that I wanted to prioritize.

How far could I extend this, usefully planning in advance? If I look back several years, could I identify larger scale patterns in the regions I've explored, and how I've navigated them?

There's a balance to strike here, both identifying natural patterns to lean into, and articulating goals and ways of navigating their implied speculative paths more intentionally.

When it comes to reading, there are many ways to navigate:

By map (list-making; planning out our reading)

By feel (exploring, guided by intuition)

Experiment with new ways for marking your place in books — saving your spot for later — pointing to particular things you've read and want to return to.

I've heard from people using Book Darts (fun + useful + minimal; I like these!), a notebook as a "tiny drawer" for storing bookmarks, dog-ears or bookjacket flaps…

At one point, I regularly used a "bookmark timer" with little paper strips I added where I'd write down my daily reading time, month by month. I now record this data digitally, separating the two concerns (bookmark + time tracking) but this was fun for a while! Now I just draw from my collection of bookmarks from cool indie publishers and bookstores.

I also have a backlog of books with book darts that I've been meaning to go through and add in notes, but it's a bit daunting and never quite urgent.

Create your own collection of great book lists, custom-tailored to your personal interests and goals…

You might focus on all-time favorites, topic or project-specific lists, your antilibrary, or other directions of your choosing.

First: spend some time generating book list possibilities (a list of lists!) Then, pick one particular list to expand on in a book curation exercise…

A fun subset of this might be "book pairings", or "book networks", ways of reading multiple books at once, with interesting resonance or complementarity.

One example: Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials novels + Daemon Voices essay collection.

Pick a favorite book that you think ~everyone should read (or at least would recommend to a particular type of person!)

Outline a guide to reading this book…

Are there particular approaches you think could be best suited?

For example, should this book be read in a group or with another person, or broken up into sections, or read out of order…?!

A fun challenge, initially via my friend Adam, that I wrote about when I first attempted it a while back…

The "next ten books challenge" is to make a list of the books you plan to read next, as a personal challenge and opportunity to think intentionally about your reading priorities.

This kind of pre-planning my reading list isn't something I ordinarily tend to do; I like making book lists, but I also like my reading on any given day to be guided by mood and serendipity.

But I found this to be a fun and useful exercise and I want to tell you a bit about why. First, my list:

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

Pedagogy of the Oppressed - Paulo Freire

Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Kimmerer

Fantasies of the Library - Springer and Turpin

A Perfect Vacuum - Stanisław Lem

Imaginary Magnitude - Stanisław Lem

The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende

The Argonauts - Maggie Nelson

Collected Essays - James Baldwin

The Teenage Liberation Handbook - Grace Llewellyn

Outline of my list-making process:

Went through the books in my nightstand, which serves as my loose and aspirational "next up" queue

Removed a half dozen or so that I was no longer excited about, abandoning them (for now) intentionally, to make room for…

Then adding several others I was actively looking forward to reading / wanted to prioritize

Based on a short essay, related forum post, and article years ago where I first read about the concept…

What books would you read 100 times?

I've never actually done this, but I love the premise of centireading — I appreciate ideas that begin to push into the absurd, and make me think about the power of reading and the boundaries of what it can be and do.

The author of the article where I originally found the idea describes reading both Hamlet and The Inimitable Jeeves over 100 times apiece, for different reasons (one academic, one for pleasure).

One interesting result of this relationship with Hamlet: "it lost its sense of cliche", every soliloquy eventually becoming equally familiar and powerful.

I'm not sure I'll ever actually do this, but even so I had fun thinking about which books I might even consider centireading:

Eunoia: for the sheer experience of lyrical language, continually inspiring for its virtuosity and poetic contributions, and just plain fun to read (and read aloud!)

His Dark Materials trilogy: my favorite fantasy series; I could see reading this to my kids and whenever I want a nostalgia trip

Cosmicomics: fantastically fun Calvino, richly imaginative stories I think would reward many reads

Minding the Muse and Make Art Make Money: two great books about, respectively, being a productive and creatively fulfilled artist, and balancing the demands of creative life with practical business concerns

Moby Dick: hilarious and poetic and grand and audacious, chapter upon chapter of strange alchemical literary splendor, and boundless insights on human nature (and nature nature)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: wonderful book about nature, time, attention; almost prose poetry, with deeply sensitive descriptions and meditations

When I first posted about this, I was glad to see a number of interesting replies, including some I wouldn't have thought of!

The enduring appeal of Invisible Cities and dependable hilarity of Hitchhiker's Guide

An annual reading of Hamlet, noticing new details each time

The Odyssey, The Idiot, Parzival, The Tao Te Ching…

Reading the Book of Psalms 1,000 times, with different methods, versions, languages (other biblical books and the Quran too)

I'd love to hear other suggestions. Are there any…

How might you break the mold of the standard "favorite books I read this year" list?

Some other possible directions to consider:

Reading diversity audit: breakdown of reading by topic/genre, by author background, etc. — and how this changes year to year

Book acquisition log: all books purchased, found, or gifted; total $ spent, where you discovered / acquired them, etc.

Other alternatives to books read: books you added to your antilibrary? books you abandoned?

Try a small experiment with an IRL reading event!

It's an interesting challenge to explore reading through the lens of social / collaborative dynamics, whether just with one friend or with a larger group.

This could be a simple discussion you structure in a particular way, or something more ambitious like a tiny pop-up bookstore you create and run for a day!

A couple fun events I've hosted in the past

antilibrary show and tell: each person brings a book (or a few) they want to read but haven't yet, and shares why they find it interesting

book swap: bring a favorite book and leave with someone else's! I've also participated in a fun variant where you put the book in a paper bag and write a note about the kind of reader who'd enjoy it, so you select a book without knowing exactly what you're going to get

Book clubs should be more weird and interesting…why not try a type of book club you've never done before!

Can you experiment with discussion formats? Ways of reading? Collaborative annotation?

Some I've found fun:

book clubs for two — read a big long classic book together with a friend or loved one, pushing each other to finish and chatting periodically (Moby Dick, The Power Broker, etc.)

blog or paper club — discuss another form of writing, like essays or papers, reading and annotating together (Fermat's Library "Journal Club" is a cool example)

live reading group — where you don't read beforehand, but take turns reading something out loud together while meeting, and discuss after

What else might you try…reading groups that are loose, emergent, fluid? Reading retreats that bring people together to read a lot in a short period of time? Other atypical schedules or structures?

Get some friends together to explore bookstores together!

You could set a route to explore favorites, each picking one or hitting all the bookstores in a dense neighborhood.

Or maybe you pick a handful of bookstores with different niches, or ones you haven't been to yet.

Once you get to each bookstore, try some fun constraints for how you browse…maybe you each pick a section to explore that you wouldn't usually be drawn to. Maybe you do a scavenger hunt where each person looks for an especially unique special book.

How can you play with organizing your own library in a personal idiosyncratic way?

What does your library look like right now? What library dreams do you have?

Libraries can be all kinds of things; can take all kinds of shapes.

Public libraries. Private libraries. Books you own. Books you share with a partner. Your antilibrary of books you've not yet read.

Your library may go well beyond books: a library of essays, browser bookmarks, PDFs, videos saved to watch later…all of these are things you might consider approaches to curating, organizing, and perhaps sharing with others.

Think about one or two aspects of your personal library:

How do you arrange your physical bookshelves? Do you use an app to track their contents? Do you sort your books in a particular way…by genre? alphabetical? some hybrid?

Do you have a special place for books you're in the middle of, or ones you recently bought, or oversized ones on a bigger shelf?

How do you organize local files on your computer? Do you have ways of finding things and tracking what you've read or want to come back to?

How you can be more intentional about keeping track of all those books you're aware of and find interesting and valuable, but haven't read?

To start, what books should be in your antilibrary?

I started with an Amazon wish list, adding any books I found that looked interesting. I later made a smaller, more selective list for my top "antilibrary" picks, and even started making a whole website to try to organize this better.

Now I have a mix of lists and more books than I can keep organized…it's a work in progress!

I think it's probably worth keeping either a couple lists (by genre, priority, whatever makes sense to you) or at least one list of the books you most want to read.

For me it can be helpful to differentiate between "looks interesting" and "I actually want to read this soon" — these are often different! Some books are fascinating but for various reasons may not be a priority to read, and that's okay.

Based on an earlier post, "on packing and pruning" books…

In preparing for our last move a few years ago, we went through the process of processing our bookshelves, nearly 1,000 books in total.

Pruning, winnowing, sorting, triage — there are many ways of talking about the process of intentional removal, of parting with the books that, for whatever reason, have been part of our lives.

Some have been with us for years, some acquired in the past month. Some completed, some ignored, some forgotten. There are many I've read and loved and wish to keep, but these make up a small fraction of the whole.

There are also many we've read, or skimmed, or looked at once or twice, and decided we're ready to part with.

Greater in number are those in my antilibrary — ones I may not have thought about recently, but as soon as I look at the cover or spine, make me remember why I got them, and excited to read them again.

These antilibrary treasures are, of course, the books to keep.

In between, messier categories:

Books received as gifts but no longer of much interest…

Books on topics I still find fascinating, but where I sense a mismatch in taste or style or resolution or approach…

Books that may be useful references but also we could probably grab the ebook or look up the material on the internet…

Books to skim first and then give away…

Books that make great decoration, or have functional utility…

Books I'll never read again, but have the urge to keep as a sort of talisman or memory marker…

A few questions to consider:

How do you decide when to read something, or if you'll ever read it at all?

How does an antilibrary expand and, perhaps on rarer occasions, contract?