January journal: choosing books

flowersforgraves asked, "What do you look for or search by if you're looking for new things to read (i.e. are you more likely to pick up something if it's by an author you've previously read in a different genre, vs if it's a similar genre but an unfamiliar author, etc.)?"

This is a great question! I definitely read by author, and sometimes I read everything by a particular author. This can be systematic, if I really like someone's work, but sometimes I casually pick up books by the same author until it turns out I've read all of them. Sofia Samatar is a "read everything, quickly" writer for me, for instance; I initially read her novels, then her collected short stories and prose poetry, and I'm really looking forward to her new memoir.

I don't keep an official to-read list--I'd rather read whatever seems most fun to me at any given moment--but if I come across a rec or review of something that sounds intriguing, I'll add it to either a wishlist or my library ebook holds. I scroll through my wishlist when I want to read a new book but I'm not sure what book I want to read. (The wishlist I use for this purpose lives on Amazon, but all else being equal I'd rather give other people money, so once I pick a book, I often buy it from somewhere else or request it from a library.)

I do pay attention to which writers blurb which books, especially when I'm browsing in a library or bookstore. The extreme case here is Fonda Lee's Jade City: the library hardback was covered in blurbs. I inferred that it was Asian-inspired secondary-world fantasy that people who care about worldbuilding liked a lot and checked it out on that basis. When I started reading, I was startled to discover it was based on twentieth-century rather than medieval history.

Another thing I do when browsing in person is read pages out of the middle of a book to see what I make of the prose and general attitude. When I was younger I'd also read the last page of a book to check whether it was unbelievably depressing, but these days I have both more interest in tragedies and more faith in my ability to guess a book's emotional tenor from other clues. The last book I read because I'd enjoyed pages chosen from the middle of a book is Saad Z. Hossain's Djinn City, which was fascinating, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes bleak. It does end on a massive cliffhanger, but (in full disclosure) the book I flipped through physically was a sequel, so I couldn't exactly have checked.