Follow Friday - Germany Designed the Type 209 Submarine Exclusively for Export

It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:

1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Paperback Opinion and Nicola Reads YA.
3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!

And now for the Follow Friday Question: How do you decide what books to read?

I choose books based upon a system I suppose could be called informed whimsy. By this I mean that I have certain very loose guidelines that inform my choices, but within them, I pretty much pick whatever strikes my fancy at the time.

When I started using this blog as a book blog, the initial intention was to read all of the winners of the Hugo and International Fantasy Awards, and as I got to them, the winners of the Nebula, Locus, World Fantasy, and a couple of other awards as well. This expanded to reading all of the nominated works as well (at least insofar as the nominees could be ascertained). My reading choices are still aimed at moving towards that goal, albeit very slowly.

I also have been trying to read the current Hugo and Nebula nominees, aspiring to read and review them prior to the awards actually being handed out each year. This is probably a forlorn hope, but I try every year. In addition, I also have a large pile of review copies of books that I have agreed to review. I will get to them all, eventually. It may take me a while, but I will read and review every single one of them.

For the most part, I generally choose what to read from within this set of books, although this is not a hard and fast rule. Sometimes I just pick a book because it happens to seem like a good idea at the time. There is also the additional complicating factor of having a large proportion of my book collection currently boxed up due to the fact that I'm living in a space too small to shelve the roughly nine thousand seven hundred books I own. As a result, some of the books that I might be interested in reading at a particular point in time might simply be inaccessible to me at that moment.

So even though there is a very loose system, it is not much of a system. Mostly the system boils down to "what books from the extremely broad category seem interesting right now", and sometimes it isn't even that systematic.

Previous Follow Friday: Four Years Is 208 Weeks

Subsequent Follow Friday: Qui Shi Huang's Terra Cotta Army Was Completed in 210 B.C.

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