Reading by Chance
When using a random-number generator is the best way to choose your next book
My reading anxieties have remained constant since I was in the second grade. Back then, a class trip to the school library was agony. We had fifteen minutes to pick our book for the week. Although the library was not large — I could see the powder line on the librarian’s neck from across the room — its shelves held a couple thousand books, arranged by the Dewey decimal number system. Like the sixteen pages of menu selections at the Chinese restaurant that my family liked to visit, the choices at the library seemed too great.
Week after week, after my classmates had carelessly selected their books and left them on the check-out cart, I remained at the shelves, trying to make up my mind. Once, while I stood undecided before two volumes on the top shelf, I grew aware of someone invading the personal space at my side. It was the librarian. She stared at me as I considered identically bound biographies, part of the same schoolboy’s series, of Ulysses S. Grant and Zebulon Pike. They had gold cloth binding and raised red letters on their spines, a plush reading package.
I thought I’d like reading about either the general or the explorer, and I knew that the soft gold cloth would make each book wonderful to hold. But which one should I pick? The librarian’s impatience was burning hot. It might be easier to avoid the decision by reexamining the book about Jim Thorpe a few feet over. I was moving down the shelf when the librarian blocked my path. “It’s time to choose,” she whispered.
I chose in a rush. I was so resentful about my forced choice that my reading all week felt spoiled. Turning the pages of Pike’s biography, I let my mind wander from the seeker of the source of the Mississippi to the other lives on the library shelves. They were like Sirens on the cliffs. I was so distracted by what I hadn’t selected that I never finished Pike’s life by the time we had to return the next week for another library visit.
Fear of failure
I developed this anxiety not from the wealth of reading possibilities I faced, but from a fear that I would suffer if the book I chose was not as good as the ones left behind. I knew there had to be good stuff I was missing. Much later, as a young adult, I dealt with this feeling by avoiding bookstores. Why spend money on a book that might prove dull? Why make the blunder of not purchasing better books? So I hunted my reading materials at the public library, which was too poorly staffed to spare a librarian to shadow my tortured progress among the shelves. I could check out ten books at a time. But even that generous allotment made it difficult for me to narrow my choices.
And here’s what happened to the stack of ten books I brought home: I set them on my dining table. I examined them. I picked up one, then another, and compared them. I read the first page of each one, all ten. I examined the authors’ bios. Before I knew it, my three weeks were up, and I had not settled upon one to read from start to finish.
One day at the start of this vicious cycle, when I was not looking at the pile of books, I decided that I would read the third book from the bottom of the stack, whatever it was. I stuck to my resolution and finished the book. How liberating it felt to make a choice, even if it was a choice in which preference played no part. I had hit upon an unexpected treatment for my book anxiety: randomness. Now I didn’t have to worry about selecting a book that might be less interesting than the rest. A random force, something unknowable and without a face, chose the book. I just read it. Randomness played to my strengths.
Free at last
Released by randomness from the burden of having to decide what I’m going to read, I’ve become an avid collector of books. I find it much easier to choose what to acquire than what to read. I have thousands of books, on shelves in nearly every room of the house. Visitors often ask me how I will read so many books. Randomly, I tell them. When they give me a strange look, I ask them if they have ever used the random shuffle function on their music player.
Over the years, my approach to randomness has grown increasingly sophisticated — increasingly detached, you might say. I have my books arranged on numbered shelves. I currently have 97 shelves full of books. Let’s say it’s time for me to start a new book. Using a random number generator that resides as an app on my phone, I produce a number between 1 and 97. Then I walk to the shelf that bears the number that the app generated. My heart pounds. I count the number of books on the shelf. Let’s say there are 32 books there. Again I whip out the random number generator and ask for a number between 1 and 32. I feel like I am spinning a roulette wheel at Mystic Lake. The generator spits out, say, 11. Counting from the left — or should I count from the right? No, left — the eleventh book on the shelf is titled Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War. Hmmm. I probably would not have selected this book to read out of all the intriguing volumes I own, but then I recall that I would not have been able to select any book from all that I own. I sit down and start reading. (Of course, I place myself under no obligation to actually complete the book. But my random solution is aimed at overcoming my anxiety about choosing, not finishing.)
You would think that my family might doubt my sanity and feel ashamed of the outlandish procedure I follow to avoid choosing a book to read. In fact, the opposite is true. My wife is grateful that I do not wander the house late at night, moving from one bookcase to another, in an anguished effort to choose. My daughters, children when I discovered my random strategy, competed to push the “Get Number” button in the random number app, count along the shelf, and pull out the designated volume. The randomness of my reading delighted them. I successfully integrated my anxiety into the family fabric. (Now that my daughters are adults, they think I and my randomness are hopelessly dorky.)
For a long time, I believed that I must be the world’s only reader suffering from this disorder. To most book lovers, the decision of what to read is personal and satisfying, a reflection of their interests, worldview, and personality. Abandoning choice would be an inconceivable pathway. Recently, though, in a well-known book blog, I found a post that detailed someone else’s random reading program that was identical to mine — even in the use of the same random number generating app. Followers of the blog commented on their own methods of reading randomly, and some confessed that they also use random numbers to determine what they play on the piano and which garments they wear each day.
I have a book on psychology that might shed light on behavioral tics like these. When I will get to it, though, is out of my hands.
