A Slave to My Tastes

Writing class was interesting last night. The format of the class is this: the first half of the class is a lecture on some important aspect of the writing profession, followed by a break and then reading what we have written. Last night was a lecture on the supply-demand aspect of publishing, and how in many ways books are looked on as a commodity. The part that struck me was how the publishers are always looking to fill the niches of taste with product and I realized that I am a slave to my own tastes. Without thinking I have chosen to read only in a narrow vertical of the market.

So I have decided that this problem calls for drastic solutions. I came up with this idea. I am going to go into the bookstore with a 12 foot long tape measure and 2 dice. The first roll will be how far down the shelf I will go in linear feet. The second roll of a single dice will be how may feet up from the floor I will go. And at the point where the 2 axis cross, that is the book I will read. When I am finished, I will go back and roll the dice from where the last co-ordinates are and re-roll to find the next book.

Some might see this as a page from the Two-Face School of Decision Making, but I put it to you that choosing books this way will eliminate any bias created by dust jacket artwork, or whether the book is in the middle sight lines and I am guaranteed to read new work. I will start at one end of the science fiction shelf and move on towards the other end of the store's fiction area.

Right now I am reading Nightfall, by Asimov and Silverberg and then it is on to the novel, Planet of the Apes. So after these are done, I will begin the experiment.

It is an exciting prospect, this non-deterministic method of book choice, because it is going to lead me into fiction I have never read before; and I might find that I really like crime fiction or new westerns or other unknown-to-me genre , or whatever is in the shelves that I land on.