Mapping your reading topography ⁂ Antilibraries Analects ⁂

This week, building on my recent musings on the shapes of reading and readers — as well as some old notes — to explore a question: what might it look like to map the topography of your reading?

This starts with a thought experiment, an attempt to visualize your reading as a landscape, a map.

Taking known books as known territory, antilibrary as distant periphery, and unknown infinite library beyond, what path do you take through this landscape over time?

Earlier, I looked at simple shape-based metaphors for common readerly tendencies and general patterns of reading; here we’ll begin to consider more complex trajectories and local particularities and exploratory approaches.

There’s no singular definition of good or correct reading. We can identify heuristics like “quality > quantity” but the answer to “what should I read?” is highly contextual and changes over time. There are “good” books you shouldn’t read now, and “worse” books that fit the moment, that fill an immediate need.

So, we can ascend a ladder of reading goals from the basic “read more books” to the slightly refined “read better books” to the more nuanced “read the best books at the right time, in the right way, for you…”

Another way of thinking about this: taking a syntopical approach — growing reading networks — writ personal.

To extend the topographical metaphor, we could start by clustering books by genre or other category, mapping their relationships. But I’m more interested in my own paths, and the sorts of unexpected clusters or sequences that I might identify from how I actually traverse the landscape.

From an earlier note to myself:

A general metaphor might be the little chart on a treadmill indicating incline angle as “hills” you’re climbing, or the elevation chart that accompanies a trail guide for a hike. Translating this to our reading pace and overall patterns can help for visualizing things like “this week I need to take it easy and have fun, but I’ll intersperse this novel with occasional chapters of a challenging book I want to finish”, or “this month I’m prepping for a big project and need to read a bunch of dense books all on one subject but after that I’ll palate cleanse with some fun stuff I’ve been meaning to get to”…and so on!

This may be useful with both retrospective and anticipatory framing:

• Retrospective: look at my reading for past years, plot out the paths traced, identify the contours…how did I interleave fiction and nonfiction? Fun books and challenging ones? Clusters of topics?
• Anticipatory: are there goals for what and how I’d like to read that might benefit from being visualized and plotted in advance?

For example looking at my “next ten books” list from a couple months back, I identified (mostly) a mix of classic novels, books on libraries and knowledge and education, books by women, and speculative meta-books that I wanted to prioritize.

So far I’ve read half these, with a couple deviations; how far could I extend this, usefully planning in advance? And if I look back several years, could I identify larger scale patterns in the regions I’ve explored, and how I’ve navigated them?

There’s a balance to strike here, both identifying natural patterns to lean into, and articulating goals and ways of navigating their implied speculative paths more intentionally.

When it comes to reading, there are many ways to navigate, for example:

• By map (list-making; planning out our reading)
• By feel (exploring, guided by intuition)
• In collaboration (reading with shared goals and travel companions)

I can also imagine more directed experiments, different map-making filters or route-planning strategies for specific scenarios:

• Group reading retreat
• Maximal relaxation and enjoyment
• Preparation for teaching a subject
• Long-term research project
• Topical book club

Implementation details for any of these left as an exercise to the reader…my future self included :)

For now, a couple questions—

Have you mapped or analyzed your reading for the past year(s)?

Have you tried to chart out potential reading goals using some kind of particular system or metaphor?

Feel free to share any thoughts here.

Brendan