Please share your systems for choosing the books you're about to read this year, if you have one. (little Update on the original post as I realised I made it a little too personal and maybe not as open to the community as I wanted it to be).

I hope that by curating a list for my reading goal, for this year, to achieve said goal.

I'm aiming to touch on various genres, cultures and writing stiles. So far I've put books into the "interested pile" but I'm not confident in sorting them or making a commitment yet as I keep stumbling over interesting lists and feel like I would like a little of everything.

Any suggestions on how to approach this are greatly appreciated!

I couldn't find any posts about this, just curious if anybody else uses the zettelkasten method or something similar for taking notes?

Zettelkasten is a note-taking system sometimes referred to as being a "second brain" that remembers things your first brain forgets, "develops sentience", and can hold conversations with you. It works REALLY WELL for me (adhd w/hoarder tendencies) because in this system, you do not have to be perfectly organized, and in fact it's actually better if you are not: chaos is a feature not a bug. There is no "right" way to organize anything (and certainly no "wrong" way), and the more unconnected notes you keep near each other, the better. It uses a tagging system that allows you to follow a trail to any note you want no matter where you've filed it, and also to develop ideas connecting concepts that may not initially seem to be connected.

Here’s the post that hooked me: — https://www.eadeverell.com/zettelkasten/ There's quite a bit of other information about it online (and in books, now), although a considerable amount skews to digital versions that use apps like Notion. There's something that works really well for me about keeping things low-tech/analog, so I use index cards!

From a friend (who also happens to have adhd with hoarding tendencies): "i'm drawn to the intuitive aspect of it, the sense in which it's both an analog computing system and a physical manifestation of the unconscious, and also the fact that it can potentially operate as kind of occult device for guidance and introspection. i like the idea of externalizing internal processes of connectivity, and it makes a lot of sense that it would appeal to you and me as people who have fraught/complex relationships with stuff."

More resources I found helpful: — http://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes — https://sociologica.unibo.it/article/view/8350/8270
— https://zettelkasten.de/posts/collectors-fallacy/ (LOLOLOLOL, hoarders read this) — https://writingcooperative.com/zettelkasten-how-one-german-scholar-was-so-freakishly-productive-997e4e0ca125
— https://zettelkasten.de/posts/no-categories/
— https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/ (a few posts in here) — https://fortelabs.co/blog/how-to-take-smart-notes/
— https://www.zettlr.com/post/what-is-a-zettelkasten ("In fact, the more you read on how to do a Zettelkasten, the less you'll actually know, because a lot of it depends on intuition and self-observation")

Here is Niklas Luhmann's zettelkasten archive: — https://niklas-luhmann-archiv.de/bestand/zettelkasten/inhaltsuebersicht — http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/viewer/ppnresolver?id=ZKLuhm

Be honest with me for a second.

Are you actually reading books right now … or are you collecting them?

Is your TBR a carefully curated reading plan, or a beautiful tower of good intentions? Are you finishing what you buy, or are you chasing the thrill of the next preorder?

No judgment. This is a safe space for the “I own it and I’ll get to it eventually” crowd.

Tell me: 📚 How many unread books are currently staring at you? 📖 And what’s stopping you from starting them?

Confessions encouraged.

it’s quite sad that everyone in the village has some constant form of grief in their lives - absent children, loneliness, dementia, being widowed, the decline of their own health