On the Art of Choosing What to Read: Essay Inspired by Iyengar's New Book

So many books, so little time.
I am 47 years old. Assuming, in a near best case scenario, that I live 40 more years, and that I read around one book per week the rest of my life, I will finish 2,000 more books before I die.
That’s a lot of verbiage. But think about all the wonderful books that have already been written-not hard to come up with 2,000 that would be nice to peruse before I perish. And now think about all the wonderful new books likely to be written over the next 50 years. How do I choose which books to read?
With so many books and so little time, the choices become daunting.
But choose I must. For if I remain frozen in indecision, my reading efforts will stall. Then, time will pass me by. Time, after all, doesn’t pause, even if my reading efforts do.
But moving forward is better than standing still. Indeed, we all need to move forward, even if the “best” direction forward is not totally clear. That is one of the take home points of Sheena Iyengar’s wonderful new book-The Art of Choosing. Iyengar is a behavioral scientist at Columbia, most famous perhaps for her “jam study”-in which she showed that people facing a choice between too many flavors of jam walk out of the grocery store without buying any jam, too frozen by indecision to make a choice even though any of a dozen flavors would have made them happy.
Iyengar’s book ranges widely over the kinds of choices we make in our lives, from grocery store decision making to the momentous choices that lead us to wedding chapels. Her discussion of arranged marriages is touching and illuminating.
Her book is what we need more of in popular psychology-an accessible eloquent and even moving tome that is nonetheless grounded in the most rigorous of psychological science.
2,000 books left in your life? I suggest reading Iyengar’s The Art of Choosing before you allow yourself to be bogged down in indecision.
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