What's on your "saved for later" list: books to buy / read soon?

Books
#1

In my latest email I shared a capsule view of 40 books I’d “saved for later” in my Amazon cart, spanning a wide variety of topics.

By my estimate all these books together would run me ~$900, probably > $1,000 if we’re looking at cover price, sans predatory pricing by the big A. Realistically I can see myself buying maybe half of these books in the near to medium term. The others, I’m happy to just have on the antilibrary list for now. That’s a big reason to have one, after all!

(Also a future post I want to do, maybe for a year-end roundup: a look at all my book buying for a year, as well as my annual reading results…will be interesting to compare the two.)

So, prompt for discussion—

Do you have a similar list? Current “saved for later” books to get to soon (whether buy or borrow)? Do you have sub-lists e.g. reading for fun vs. reading to learn something specific? What makes you want to buy a book now/soon vs. just vaguely have it on your list?

#2

One thing I have been trying recently is marking entries in the bibliographies of books where I want to explore the subject matter more in depth. In a way I think of bibliographies as baked in “saved for later” lists!

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#3

Nice, that’s a great point. Definitely a good way to find new interesting books, crawling the graph of good things you’ve already read to find a text’s influential peers and predecessors, that have already been vetted by an author you trust.

Do you keep a running list of these, or physically mark them in the books as you go? Sometimes I’ll google a reference that looks interesting, but I realize I don’t have any sort of regular / systematic way of doing this after I finish a book, or keeping track of the most promising ones.

Also making me realize: I’ve come across all sorts of great reading lists, but can’t recall seeing any reading graphs, i.e. specific visualizations of book networks. I guess I’ve probably seen certain historical charts of influential books, but seeing actual reading / book discovery graphs for real people would be cool!

#4

I physically mark them in the books as I go, putting a star next to the books of interest in the book’s bibliography. Definitely not systematic but useful for later combing throughs.

Visual book networks would be interesting! I am imagining something like Are.na’s Pilgrim web maps but for a book’s bibliography.

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