How do you choose yours?

A recent comments exchange on the lovely H’s blog post got me to thinking about how to choose my next book.  The TBR pile is growing, not diminishing, and there’s almost too much choice now.  Never too many books (no such thing!) but such a variety of choice that selecting the next book presents a little bit of a quandary.

Now it’s quite possible that I've been inspired by my role as the organiser of this years Secret Santa, but I have decided to write out the names of books on slips of paper, fold them and place them in a hat/box/tub of some sort, and pick my next book randomly.  I picked my current read this way, and hope to have a review for you soon on The Girl Who Saved The King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson.

I have no idea if this will work long term as a strategy, but it might mean that some of those books that have been on the TBR pile for a while (2-3 years in some cases!) actually get picked.

How do you choose your next book?

Pauses in reading

Moving to a new home, at least 90 miles in any direction from all friends and family has meant that I have had plenty of time for reading the last few months.  I am pretty busy at weekends, usually off visiting folks, but with my daily commute, evenings and lunchbreaks free I've managed to get through a fair bit.

This weekend my sister visited me, and brought my niece with her.  It was really very nice to be on the receiving end of a visit for a change, and I loved having them with me.  It was their first visit, both to my new home, and to Cambridge, and I miss them very much already.

Having said that, I never get any reading time with visitors around, we spend too much time chatting, exploring the area and cooking.  All lovely activities of course, but the one benefit of being alone again is I get back my precious reading time.