on choosing what to read in the face of large collections
I got to go op shopping today before my dental appointment. I have come home and found myself stacking up this pile of books. Great haul, hey? But what I'm really thinking about right now is something that I often find fascinating - how it came to be that out of the thousands of book spines and covers I scanned in three different shops I came out with this particular pile, out of all the possibilities. It's always hard for a reader to choose just a few books when faced with a large collection. So how did I end up with this pile? First, of course, there is the delightfully random nature of books in op shops. Nobody has specifically chosen these books for these shops. They have ended up here like flotsam that floated in on tides of post-consumer and pre-loved collections among the community. Staff and volunteers attempt to wrangle the tides into some kind of categories and relegate shelving. And then the fun for me is to find the treasure. What makes these books t...