How to Read the Xmbrst Way

1) First, eschew any idea of using your pleasure reading for "self improvement" and discard all received notions of what constitutes a good book. One way to achieve this enlightenment is to spend seven years in an English Literature doctoral program, where, with proper attention to literary history, you will learn that works come to be considered great at least as much because of their authors' skill at self-promotion as because of their beauty. You may be able to find a quicker way to acquire this wisdom. In any case, once you are free of the delusion that accumulating cultural capital is the same thing as accumulating virtue or understanding, you can proceed to find and satisfy true literary desires.

2) Read what you want to. Don't ask why you want it: most desires serve some purpose, but knowing the purpose doesn't further it. Feed your head the reading it craves.

3) Embrace your existential freedom to put down a book. You are reading that book because you chose to read it--you have no moral obligation to finish it before you start another one, or ever. If another book tempts you, succumb. Here are a few of the books I currently have in progress. I am enjoying all of the items on this list, and I mean to finish them all -- some day. At least two have been on pause for years. (I have omitted books I have no intention of finishing.)

• The Dreamthief's Daughter by Michael Moorcock
• Exodus from the Long Sun by Gene Wolfe
• Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson
• The Translator by John Crowley
• Story by Robert McKee
• Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
• Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
• Essential Doctor Strange (That's right, you can also leave comic books unfinished.)
• A Lover's Almanac by Maureen Howard
• Popeye by Segar, edited by Mike Higgs
• The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
• The Arabian Nights (appropriately enough)

Of course when that rare book grabs you and won't let go, dance the dance until the music ends. My last nonstops: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks, and, yes, The DaVinci Code. (Remember -- no shame. Ok, maybe a little shame.)

Follow these three simple principles and soon you too will attain the ideal of true literary polymorphous perversity.

Note: I would provide individual links to the above books, but reading the xmbrst way has weakened my character to the point where I am unable to exert the required effort. You can always go to Amazon and find the books for yourself.