I like to read, and have been actively for only two years, give or take, getting most of my books from the main big-box retailer here in Canada with specific targets in mind, based off long Goodreads TBRs that I’d compiled via online recommendations. This made me sort-of hate going to bookstores, because I would just walk in for the sake of finding the one thing I wanted and leaving. So, when I was asked by someone at my book club to grab a reserved book at a used book store, I checked out the place. I decided that I would be fun to grab a couple books that I had never heard of and try them out. Without really looking at their blurbs or contents whatsoever, I picked up “Night Flight” by Saint-Exupéry (the guy who wrote “The Little Prince”) and some niche classics that I’d never heard of.
After the next while of reading these, “Night Flight” stood out to me as something so strangely special. The way it describes the nature of the South American regions it is set in was so interesting, and it was so relentless in its philosophical tangents that it becomes a think piece of itself. I could go on.
What’s important is, I felt as if I’d just win the book lottery. After a decent while of reading books that I thought I would love, but ended up just being lukewarm towards, or unimpressed at all, I ended up with something that I clicked with immediately. So, in the following weeks, I went back a few more times, and found some more stuff that I really enjoyed. Even if some of them were repetitive, unpolished, or filled start-to-finish with small town church politics, they all held so much personality, and there was always something to take away.
Maybe it’s just that by picking books randomly off a shelf lowers my expectations, but I find so much magic in playing in the book lottery. Not knowing what the h/ll is going to go down in that two-hundred page fictional meditation on agriculture, or poetry collection from some Sri Lankan guy you’ve never heard of, or mediocre translation of some ancient Greek dude who accidentally preserved his shopping list for future historians to read over, always adds something to the experience.
In that sense, I think I love the book lottery just because of how hard it is to lose when every work, no matter how niche, has questions unanswered and a tension that always exists in exploring something that you don’t know much about. To me, tension and curiosity is what reading is all about, so adding mystery can make even the most uninspired works worth traversing. I cannot recommend it enough, even if it means backlogging that enormous list of books you want to get to.
What’s your opinion on this kind of reading? It seems like such a logical thing to do, but I don’t see people discussing it often. I understand that I can take away from the group experience of reading, but I see it, even in that sense, as a way to broaden your horizons in ‘literature’ and apply these perspectives to those bigger group discussions.
by heckmanguy