The Reading List I Rebuild Every Season

A reading list is a promise made by a more optimistic person. By the third month I've usually stopped keeping it, and the list sits in a drawer like an unpaid bill. So four times a year, when the weather turns, I throw it out and build a new one. The old list isn't a failure. It's a record of who I was in June.

The rebuild takes about an hour and I try to keep it unglamorous.

Start with the evidence

Before I write anything, I look at what I actually did. Which books are face-down on the nightstand with a train ticket in them? Which ones did I finish in a single weekend? Which one have I been carrying round the flat for nine weeks without opening?

This is humbling, but it's honest data. Last autumn I discovered I'd finished almost nothing I'd planned to and had devoured three paperbacks that arrived by accident, one borrowed, one from a charity-shop box, one left behind by a visitor. The list had been telling me what I thought I should read. The nightstand told me what I wanted to.

Five slots, no more

The new list gets five slots. Five is small enough that I can see the whole thing at once, and large enough to have some variety.

• One book I'm half-way through already. It's cheating, and it works.

• One book for the job. Something that feeds whatever I'm writing this season, even if the connection is a stretch.

• One book that's too big. The thick one I've been intimidated by. It gets a slot so I can't pretend it isn't there.

• One book to be bad at. Poetry, for me, or something with maths in it. Reading it badly still counts.

• One book chosen by someone else. A friend's pressing recommendation, handed over with a look.

A list of five is a plan. A list of fifty is a mood.

What I leave off

Anything I'd be reading in order to have read it. Anything that arrived with a feeling of obligation. Anything I've moved from list to list across four seasons, which is the clearest sign I don't want it. I give those a send-off: they go on a shelf by the door with a sticky note saying "not yet", and they don't come back unless someone asks for them.

My friend Ravi says this is a very organised way to be sentimental. He's right about that too.

Letting the list be wrong

The part I've had to learn is that the list is allowed to break in week two. If the too-big book turns out to be tedious, I drop it and say so, in writing, on the list itself. If a stray paperback from the charity-shop box grabs me instead, it takes a slot and something else steps out.

The point isn't to finish five books. The point is to know, at the end of the season, what I chose and what chose me, and to notice which of the two I trust more. Right now, the nightstand is ahead.

Next quarter's list goes up on the fridge the first morning it's properly cold. The old one goes in the drawer with the others.