book divination

 From time to time, someone asks me how I find books to read. The process looks a bit like this:

While this clip shows Catherine Brant at work in 1954 divining subterranean water sources in the English countryside, it is akin to how I move in print-laden spaces (libraries, book stores, magazine stands, rare book stalls, etc.). In those environments, I find myself subject to mysterious impulses, tugged by opaque forces and animalian currents.

We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word “smell,” for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him.

Kenneth Grahame, “Dulce Domum,” The Wind in the Willows

Similar feelings occur when I am standing in front of the bookshelves or stacks or piles in my house: an openness to inscrutable signals. They almost always lead me to something good. I think one of the best things any reader can do for themselves is to cultivate this capacity.

Ways I do not pick a book:

• Algorithms
• Popularity
• Recommendations (with a very few exceptions)

Still, even knowing that so many recommendations miss the mark because people are wonderfully, specifically strange, I do occasionally compile sprawling lists of books that I think might make excellent gifts for certain readers. If you are curious, they are linked below.

The dreamiest gift: time to read and write. Photo from the collection of Billy Parrott.

• Vol I: Books for, among others, toddlers who love adjectives, cooks of elevated thriftiness, and aspiring critics.
• Vol. II: Books for, among others, doomsday preppers, romantic scientists, bell-ringers, and evil financiers/crypto enthusiasts.
• Vol. III: Books for, among others, small and persistent questioners, middle-aged witches, the wryly empathetic, and mycophile wellness hustlers.
• Vol. IV: Books for, among others, bourgeois anarchist cooks, women who want it all, lovers of Victorian gossip, undead grammarians, and unsentimental Ohioans.

I also share the books on my personal wishlist each year in posts celebrating an imaginary jólabókaflóð (Yule book flood); you can find those here. See also: Years of non-book gift guides (many of which do, in fact, include books), indexed here.

Aspirational winter reading ensemble.

Wishing you warmth and time to read and days with more light.