How to you keep up with your to-read list and what is the next book on it?
I don’t have a comprehensive list of books I’d like to read. A few years ago I realized that there’s a whole heap of classics I hadn’t read, like War and Peace, or the Brothers Karamazov. I looked up the Guardian’s list of 100 best books ever. Of course not every title on that list is palatable (laughs). I picked out about 70 of them, some I’d already read in the past, and by today I’ve read around 50 from that list.
In general, I like reading fiction. How do I choose which book? Usually from some collection. If it’s a good collection (e.g. Zbirka XX. Stoletje from Cankarjeva Publishing House), then you don’t need to worry too much or filter through the titles; maybe one won’t be great, but the majority are great. Another that I really liked was the Kaif collection (from Založba /*cf. Publishing House). These are books written by authors from the third world, for instance Egyptian, Indian, etc. there’s an incredible book from Nigeria on the Guardian’s list, Thing Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe. I randomly stumbled across one of the books from this collection and then read even more of them.
As far as business books go, we get IBM’s e-newsletter at the office, which recommends a new business book every 2 weeks. Every now and again I read one that’s interesting. It’s true, though, that I read relatively few such books, maybe 5 a year. Usually these are quite general in subject matter (e.g. Irresistible by Adam Atler, which talks about our dependence on technology, or The Upside of Stress by Kelly McGonigal). I cannot fathom how some people read 20 or more business books a year. Every year.
Sometimes I come across a book online, like in one article I read about a historical monograph on the Habsburg empire (by Pieter M. Judson); it’s pretty exhaustive (500 pages) and I quite recommend it.