Used bookstores and randomness
Here is Byrne Hobart on used bookstores as useful, if dangerous, places for injecting randomness into one's reading life. I've been thinking about these questions and have taken the simpler path of just reading semi-randomly from huge, high-quality anthologies. A few notes about used bookstores specifically:
- They're often great places to get cheap versions of classics, often with choices in size, font, and layout. Byrne's worries about adverse selection just don't apply as sharply to classics: there are tons of copies floating around, especially if it's a syllabus-friendly work, and (alas) people just aren't reading them as much. (They should.)
- I always spend some time actually reading in the bookstore, even if it's just sentences or paragraphs here and there. That reading has variable value, but the value is rarely zero. If you want to be reading, a good simple strategy is just to go surround yourself with huge piles of books! An underrated aspect of the Kindle ecosystem is getting the first X% of almost any book for free; in a used bookstore, you get a more generous, if much more time- and content-limited, sampling policy.
- They're great places to bring children, in part because you can often get outdated reference books at low prices. (This is relevant, and note that it doesn't matter much if the Guinness Book in question is eight years old.)
- Combining previous notes: browsing different editions of a book, especially from different time periods, is great fun. Here I'm often looking for books I have read before, to see what an editor has to say about it.