A Little Lit Roulette

We’re into May. Europe Central ’s done . Things in Nature Merely Grow ’s done . I’m on page 959 of theMystery.doc but paused before I dive into the final sections. Next book club book will be Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days,0 but we don’t meet till June, so I have a moment yet before I need to start it. I’m always trying to time it so that I finish with the book fresh in my head when the discussion arrives.

All this to say I found myself perusing my shelf a couple of weeks ago, trying to decide what to read next, and nothing stood out. Or maybe everything stood out. Either way, there was nothing in particular I wanted to pull down and crack open. Choice paralysis, analysis paralysis—whatever you want to call it, it’s real.

Plenty of people have written about how we feel it everywhere these days. Between streaming platforms, libraries, and the Internet Archive (and pirating, as a particular friend often likes to remind me), there’s virtually nothing we can’t watch, read, or listen to if we so choose. But the reality of that, often, is that we scroll endlessly, or we keep clicking rightward in the carousel of options, or we trace our finger along the shelf, passing title after title.

So, lately I’ve gotten into pure randomization. It started when I realized Goodreads has the feature built into its sort settings.0 I selected it, refreshed the page of my “Want to Read” list, and there at the top was J. D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Of course! I hadn’t even been considering it, but as soon as I saw it there, it felt fresh, correct, inevitable. I pulled it down and sped through it in a few days.

(And I’d like to pause here to admire the actual bookworm holes in my copy, chewed by some little pair of grubs or larvae, somewhere between the book’s printing in the early ’60s and its landing in my hands.)

Ceding the choice to something external felt freeing, similar to the way people will fill their closets with ten copies of the same outfit to unburden themselves of having to coordinate a look. But standardizing a wardrobe is a practice of active reduction, whereas randomizing book picks is a practice of simple acceptance. “I will sample what is chosen, and either I’ll like it enough to finish it, or I’ll close it and move on.”

Also, many of the books on my shelf have been there for years, and whatever initial enthusiasm I had when I first purchased them is long gone. Letting the fates decide which I read next has a nice rekindling effect, like I’m happening upon each book anew. After finishing Franny and Zooey, I spun the wheel again and got Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives. I’m not speeding through it at quite the same pace, but I find myself more excited to open it.

The constant influx and influence of AI and algorithms has kept me guarded against handing over my decision-making to outside forces, but there’s a distinction to be made between forces driven by predetermination and those that are nondeterministic. Algorithms offer an illusion of discovery (the endless TikTok/Reels scroll, the suggested new titles on Netflix, etc.), but the content they serve up becomes more and more undifferentiated as they figure out what box to put you in. I watch an ’80s crime thriller on Prime Video, and suddenly the suggested titles at the top of my account are more ’80s crime thrillers, and so I watch a couple more, and in turn I’m suggested dozens more, and on and on. Randomization short-circuits the stagnancy that the algorithms cultivate. Plus, I haven’t handed over the most important piece of decision-making: namely, what’s on the shelf in the first place.

I’m using the shuffle feature for my Letterboxd watchlist now, too. Ditto for a list of 516 tracks I’ve saved and labeled on YouTube Music as “Stuff to Try.” Opportunities for surprise, delight, and unexpected connection are on the rise. I watched Twinless the other day after skipping over it many times, thinking I wasn't in the mood, and I've discovered how much I like Beach Bunny , a band that had been languishing forgotten on my "Stuff to Try" playlist for well over a year.

I’m not normally a gambling man, but let’s keep spinning the wheel and see what happens.