{"id":18335,"date":"2016-04-05T08:00:21","date_gmt":"2016-04-05T12:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18335"},"modified":"2016-04-05T08:00:21","modified_gmt":"2016-04-05T12:00:21","slug":"one-customers-system-for-to-read-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=18335","title":{"rendered":"One Customer’s System for To-Read Lists"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love being surprised by customers. A couple in their sixties wandered into the bookstore last weekend and spent quite a bit of time in the mystery section. The male half of the couple eventually approached the counter in search of a new author to try. He’d had to take one off his ‘list of twenty,’ he said, because that author’s\u00a0books had declined over the past several, and this gentleman was finally giving up on him.
\n“Your list of 20?” I was intrigued. If there’s anything I like, it’s hearing how different minds process information, or organize themselves.
\n
\n“I read quickly,” my customer\u00a0explained, “so I find if I have a list of 20 authors I want to read, that usually\u00a0keeps me in books for the year.”
\nHe explained that he makes himself read a ‘serious’ title every fifth book or so \u2014 “like Manchester’s book on Churchill,”\u00a0or something highly literary \u2014 not only to make sure he read more than escape fiction, but also because if he doesn’t salt his ‘list of 20’ with extra\u00a0titles, he runs out of books before the year is out.
\nHe turned his phone around so I could see his\u00a0list, which he created in an app called Paperless<\/a>.\u00a0The\u00a0list\u00a0looked something like this:
\n\"IMG_6388\"
\nExcept that his page was fully populated with his 20 authors. (The one above is a bare-bones example I created\u00a0to give you the general idea.)\u00a0The\u00a0numbers in front of the authors’ names\u00a0are a code to make sorting the list easy.<\/p>\n