So a guy walks into City Lights Books…

Why am I doing this?

My goal in recording all of this in a public forum is not the desire to be flagrant in my erudition. It is, rather, to share a process that I hope can help others do what I am doing. My focus here will be to pass on what I learn so that you can:

• Understand why we should care what we read into ourselves;
• Discover what reading would be the most meaningful to us;
• Choose our books well, based less on what they will mean to us rather than on what They think we should read (whether “They” are our peers, the editorial staff of the London Review of Books, the English Department at Yale University, or the recommendation bots at Amazon.com)
• Share what these books mean to us. There will be a comments section here. A blog is a conversation, not a lecture, and I invite/beg/challenge you to talk to me about this process and share your own.

The goal of this effort will be to develop a process by which people can select, read, absorb, and share the books that are most meaningful to them. I’m the guinea pig. Please join me in the lab. You have nothing to lose but your boredom.