Maybe this should be in Book Talk, I don't know. But here goes:

The Facts:

1. I recently married to a fellow LT member.
2. We jointly own over 10,000 books.
3. Both of us have completely read under half of them.

The Game:

1. Each week randomly choose five books from the catalog.
2. Use polyhedron dice left over from playing Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. As an example: you roll "85" and and then "17". You then go to book number 8517 in your catalog, with the books ordered in some fashion. Adjust according to size of catalog.
2. Jointly choose one of those books for both of you to read over the next week.
3. No cheating. You must randomly select the books. You must pick one of the five. No "practice rounds", etc.

Variant Rules:

1. You may choose a category of book and then randomly pick, etc. For example, both of us have been reading a lot of fiction recently. So for our second week we decided to pick from among our non-fiction books--over half of the catalog.

Our First Week:

1. The possibilities:

a. Wuthering Heights
b. There will be Time by Poul Anderson
c. E Pluribus Unum, a history of the founding era of the United States, by Forrest McDonald.
d. The Lanague Chronicles by F. Paul Wilson, a libertarian science fiction omnibus of novels.
e. Glimpses of the Moon, a mystery novel by Edmund Crispin.

We chose There Will be Time, partly out of interest, partly based on the fact that one or both of us had read some of some of the other ones.

Questions:

Has anyone else tried something like this? Does five books make it too broad or "easy"? Would it be more fun to make it, say, one book that you have to read? Are we weird?

Message edited by its author, Oct 28, 2009, 5:17am.

So, I'm trying to visualize this "both reading the book at the same time" thing. Is it like playing the piano using a sheet music turner? I'm seeing one person holding the book and the other one turning the pages.

Are we weird?

"Cute" comes to mind :-)

There are couples who read aloud to each other, so that would work as reading at the same time, if you count listening as reading, which in these days of audiobooks I suppose we can.

Sharing a copy can be tricky, unless you have different work schedules. An alternative is reading aloud together. My wife and I have been doing this for years, mainly with fiction, and I'd definitely recommend it. It makes for slower reading but that has advantages. Instead of talking about a book mainly when it's over and done, as we tend to do for our private reading, we talk about it as it unfolds, how it's working, or not. I think it helps us notice more. We can tell when a book is really working well for us when we start talking about the characters in everyday conversation along with the usual gossip about real-life friends and colleagues. Wonder what Becky Sharp will get up to next? That sort of thing. And later, when the book is done, it becomes part of a shared lore, often linked to the time or place where we were reading it. Which is another plus.

If reading aloud isn't for you, then what you'll probably have sounds more like a book club for two. Which, if it works, why not? Your selection process sounds funky but it could shake up familiar uses and generate some interesting results. One possible drawback, though, would be if there was a particular title you really wanted to share. Then it might be time to break the rules...

>3 I think audiobooks are fine but it's not the same experience as doing it yourself.

If having both people read the same book is a problem, a good idea might be to roll the dice and pick 2 books, then each of you read one of them and swap when you're both finished.

Fun stuff, Oakes. (And congrats on your new marriage, many years of happiness to you both.) Hubby and I are currently reading a book aloud to each other... Wuthering Heights! Curious.

We just started reading to each other this year; this is the third book we've read. The first one we both became interested in jointly and read for the first time together. For the second one, I picked three novels I had read that I thought he might like, read the first few pages of each and let him choose. The third one, Wuthering Heights, he chose; I read it in high school and disliked it, and he has read it many times and liked it, so he wanted me to give it a second chance.

We'll probably continue to play things by ear and either choose a book together (we're considering Great Expectations for our next read) or alternate and let him pick, then me.

We used to sometimes read the same book, each of us on our own, and then discuss it, but for the reasons that krolik has listed, we've come to prefer reading aloud.

My fiance recently brought up the idea of reading a book aloud together, but our work schedules don't mesh enough.

It was going to be Paul Malmont's Jack London in Paradise because we enjoyed reading his Chinatown Death Cloud Peril aloud to each other on a three-day road trip a few years ago. Somehow I can read aloud in a moving vehicle just fine, even though it makes me quite ill to read silently.

Instead, we're doing the 'read two books at the same time and then swap' thing. Books by brothers, in fact, which increased the appeal. Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Austin Grossman's Soon I Will be Invincible.

Thank you for your comments. Actually, when I said "together" I didn't mean aloud. I have a weird and flexible job schedule, and we often read when we are apart, so I guess I figured that it wouldn't be difficult for us to trade the book back and forth. But I might very well be wrong on that. We'll see how it works.

With me being a woefully slow reader, it'd never work for us, but I really like the random selection aspect of choosing a book.

With my luck, we'd roll only vampire/werewolf/romance/teen/urban-fantasy genre books. MrsHouseLibrary gave me an extrapolated synopsis of each chapter (of all the books in the Twilight series) as she finished it - despite my pleadings with her to ~NOT~ do that. I really hated the interruptions from what I was reading at the time. Now she's not allowed to ever mention anything remotely related to them. But, that's the only genre that she's purchased over the past couple of years.

And congrats on the marriage thing, Oakes. As we rarely participate in the same Groups, I was unaware of your change of status.

I love this idea - you are most certainly not weird (although many may believe that I am somewhat 'speshal' so I may be damning you both with faint praise ...). As I can't get my husband within 10 miles of LT (why did I marry him again?), I think I might just play this as a solo endeavour. I don't have any crazy dice though so I'm just going to have to work out another randomisation technique ...

(I now have a lovely cartoon image in my head of two people gritting their teeth and tugging at a single volume that's fit to split in the middle)

1. Recently-married fellow LT member reporting. :)
2. We ARE weird, but I think it is a reasonably good thing.

I'm also enjoying everyone's comments. My copy of The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril is sitting in Houston, still, but I will remember it for the future, as I think it's one we might both get a kick out of. And as for Wuthering Heights - I also hated it when young, and thought it might be time to give it another try. But making it a fresh read for both of us has appeal.

Giving a jolt to our routine makes it a good way of keeping us exploring the books, rather than viewing them as especially congenial wallpaper, save certain sections. Still, I have a sneaking fear that sometimes the dice will avoid all the marvelous books to be read, and land on unusually barren sets of five. ;)

I like the idea of reading any novels or poetry selected aloud; and though the schedule is fluid enough for us to trade a single copy, with reasonably short books, we have the time an oral reading would take. The process of sharing the book seems much more pleasurable.

Perhaps Tim could implement a pick-a-random-book from a collection feature.

That would be fun.

In the long run, if you bind yourselves to this game, you might become more selective about your book purchases. Whether that's a good or bad thing...?

Even though I purchase books at a much faster rate than I actually read them (or even could potentially read them), I don't purchase books that I don't or wouldn't want to read. Now, obviously I might want to read some books more than others, and which ones I actually do read will depend on my mood, what intellectual "phases" I might be in, etc. But they're all in the running, so to speak.

However, I do have some books in my library that I purchased as a younger person where for whatever reason I am just not interested in the subject anymore. Equally, I have a number of "current events" type books from years ago, where the events, so to speak, have now expired. My "cold war" library featuring, among other things, analyses of what the Soviets were really up to, how their economy was really doing, etc., now, sadly (or rather, happily) has much less attraction for me than it used to.

Julie and I have an interesting mix of similar/different intellectual interests. But I think we, so to speak, respect each other's minds to such an extent that anything one of us likes is looked on by the other as at least worth investigating.

The primary limiting factor for selectivity is space. The post-bachelor, marriage and future family budget has also become increasingly important.

Message edited by its author, Oct 28, 2009, 10:39pm.

The primary limiting factor for selectivity is space. The post-bachelor, marriage and future family budget has also become increasingly important.

Tell me about it! My 2-year old monster needs her own room and I'm having to, dare I say it, relocate the library from the spare room. So many books, so little space. Little people come with their own book collections too, you know.

I'm getting married in March and we currently have separate apartments. Adequate wallspace for bookcases is a big priority for the new place we move into, and we're having all sorts of discussions about how (or whether) to integrate our libraries. And the family budget for books, especially when it's something we're both interested in reading. And whether we want a single household LT account for easiest inventory tracking. Gah!

I do still have my gaming dice though, and really like the idea of setting up a randomizer.

Tim once described setting up such a randomizer as something he could do in less than half an hour on the subway ride home, or something. And he did it!

19: I remember there were these randomizers. I wonder if it'd be possible to make one for individual libraries?

For all you about-to-be-married, recently-married and just-kicking-the-idea-around types...
the first essay in Anne Fadiman's book Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader is titled Marrying Libraries. I highly recommend it. The whole book is great, but this one essay in particular is worth the price of the book all by itself.

I don't own a lot of books, I'm a public library user, but I do read a lot, and check out 5+ books per month. I might try to find a way to choose 1 completely random book each month. There are places online (such as Random.org) where you can roll a die with any number of sides. I could roll a 2-sided die (flip a coin) for fiction/nonficton, and then just keep narrowing it down until I get to a random book. For example, if I got nonfiction, roll three 9-sided dies for a random DDC number and then figure a way to randomize it more from there. :)

Of course, I'd have to give myself a broad selection in the end so I'm not being forced to read something I don't like, but it could be fun every once in awhile.

>21 Good to know! I'll take it home tonight.

(Belonging to LT is 'bad' for anyone's TBR pile, but extra dangerous when you work at a library.)

Belonging to LT is 'bad' for anyone's TBR pile, but extra dangerous when you work at a library

I can imagine. I hope to get a "grunt" job at the local library once my car gets fixed...but I am apprehensive about what would happen to my wishlist if I were to get it.

#22: Ape "roll three 9-sided dies"

Is that what you say in Ohio? If so, good luck to you, The English language ought to get more regular.

Be that as it may, you do realise that rolling 3 nine-sided dicedies is far from the same as rolling one 27-sider?

Message edited by its author, Oct 29, 2009, 3:04pm.

That's exactly the point. You roll a 9-sided die for each number. For example, rolling 1, 5, and 4 would result in 154, which is Subconscious & altered states. You could round it off to 150 and simply get anything under the Psychology subject. Why on earth would you roll a 27 sider?

#22: Ape "roll three 9-sided dies"

Is that what you say in Ohio? If so, good luck to you, The English language ought to get more regular.

I used Dice in the singular form a couple times in that post, and then added an S without thinking in that sentence. There's no reason to be condescending...

Message edited by its author, Oct 29, 2009, 3:31pm.

Do you have the picture of that 9-sided die by Escher?

#26: Ape "That's exactly the point. You roll a 9-sided die for each number. "

My bad, I didn't realise what the three were for. But why not 10-sided? Doesn't DDC, whatever it is, use zeros?

You're right, I always skip straight to 100 when at the library because the computer science section is lost on me. :(

Dies is actually correct. A single gaming polyhedron is a die. A group of two or more of them are referred to as dice. In the context of how Ape used it - roll three 9-sided dies... - the reference to the number of sides requires that a plural of the singular form be used.

And now you know why I don't teach English-as-a-Second-Language.

Second Week:

Picking for two weeks at a time means that it's easier to trade off books. This time we decided that we would choose among non-fiction works:

1. Infallibility--the Crossroads of Doctrine by Peter Chirico.
2. God's Funeral by A. N. Wilson.
3. American Chameleon: Individualism in Trans-National Context by Richard Curry.
4. A Basic History of the United States: 1878-1928 by Clarence Carson.
5. In Confidence by Anatoly Dobrynin.

We went with Infallibility--the Crossroads of Doctrine. And boy was I sorry. (I started it last night.) Nevertheless, the rule is you have to stick it out.

Message edited by its author, Oct 30, 2009, 12:23am.

>30

There are a lot of good books that are not computer science in the 001 - 099 section of my library. Of course you might have to reroll or round oddly to miss the computer related ones.

I did bring home Anne Fadiman's Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader last night, per WholeHouseLibrary's recommendation. The essay on marrying libraries was short, so I read it aloud while my fiance made dinner. We both found it hilarious. And in the end she talks about the same edition of Travels with Charley that I own and he recently read, so that was neat.

There are perils in marriage I don't always remember, yet: like posting from a spouse's account. :)

J.

Message edited by its author, Nov 2, 2009, 1:57am.

16: Julie and I have an interesting mix of similar/different intellectual interests. But I think we, so to speak, respect each other's minds to such an extent that anything one of us likes is looked on by the other as at least worth investigating.

Entirely agreed. Whether it would ever have occurred to me or not, there are few things, indeed, that I wouldn't give a chance on that account.

18: Oh, yes! Adding my books to Oakes' catalogue has seemed a good compromise. Having them all visible in one place, as is slowly happening, has enough usefulness to be worth doing, but aside from social difficulties, a single account would have seen 'my' library dwarfed by his.

In general: I can't say our first two choices have shown off the riches of our combined resources, but it's promising. Does anyone have ways of sharing reading, or suggestions, that haven't been mentioned, yet?

The next time I see a copy of Ex Libris, I will have to pick it up, at last.

Message edited by its author, Nov 2, 2009, 1:59am.

Using the wrong name, were we? ;-)

BTW. I forgot to add. Oakes is just the greatest husband!

Of course he is!!

But the really important thing in a marriage is mutual trust. Things like, oh I don't know, him telling me his LT password and me telling him my LT password. It's one of those examples of mutual sharing and giving.

You're off to a good start. Lee and I had 34 years. I can wish you no less, and hopefully many more.

What the devil? ... Oh, very good! Very very good indeed! Where did they get you, a people's copying service, or are you one of those double agents we hear so much about these days?

I take it I'm supposed to go all fuzzy round the edges and run off into the distance, screaming "Who am I?"

Probably. I've no idea.

I have no idea either. But it's often like this at home.

Message edited by its author, Nov 2, 2009, 2:34am.

For which all of us pity you.

>44
If anyone gets pedantic about the plural of the word "die," just tell them you were speaking of euro-dice. They're totally different - even grammatically - from the ones we use here in the good ol U.S., by Gawd.

I figured there had to be a virtual 12-sided die somewhere. The correlation of D&D geeks-to-programmers is just too strong.

Here

My hubs and I have between us a Kindle and a couple of iPhones. So, we use the same Kindle username and share the account (and books). We still don't read the same thing at the same time, but mostly because he's hip-deep in Infinite Jest, which I refuse to read.

(Note: the Kindle saves your place when you're reading, so that could be a potential problem if you were going to try to access the same book from different devices.)