How many of those have I read?

Once during a class, the professor took everyone from the lecture hall for a walk to his office and as we all gathered and crowded into his office he said," take a look around what do you see?" His office was densely packed book shelves on three sides. We all replied, lots of books! "how many of them do you think I've read?" We all took our guesses and we were all very surprised at the reply....it wasn't that many and my surprise soon turned to disappointment.....I really thought he had read, or should have read all of them.....
This brings me to the theme of this post. I enjoy books, one of my prides and joys is my magic book collection. And after that day I went home and looked at my magic book collection and asked myself, " how many of these books have I read?"

It was an interesting question, I decided to go over the shelves book by book and see if I've read everything. My feeling was that I had completely read 95% of them.
I thought there were a few different types of books, those you read and re read often, those you buy to read once then keep as collectibles, lastly  those you start and put down after a few pages because it didn't meet your expectations.
So off I went to review each and every book title. I realized that I was almost right, it turns out that I have completely read about 75% of the books. I found a few that I didn't even remember I had,  and rekindled my love for certain titles that I haven't gone through in years.
I did find many book marked and dogeared pages for effects and concepts that I wanted to revisit to improve or enhance my performances. Out of those ideas many of them have actually made it to my act, some of them went in and didn't make the cut.
Reading magic books is often a great way to relax. Last post I wrote about things that inspire you to be creative and often times reading through certain classic magic books helps solve creative problems. For me whenever I come across a magic or routinizing challenge I can't wait to crack the binding on one of my favorite texts.
How do you decide on what books to buy? You really can't just get every book that comes out as they do take up space and they are not all relevant, so where do recommendations come from?
I encourage you to join discussion groups and speak to other magicians about the books you read and undoubtedly they will have recommendations. I have gotten the last few book recommendations from discussions in the McBride Mystery School and some from The Magic Word Podcast, two sources I've mentioned before in my blog posts. My most recent books have been about performance skills, script writing, magic philosophy and history.  I've made it a point to email or post my thanks to those who recommended the titles and that I really enjoyed them, kindness and gratitude are always in order.
So that brings me back to the question, "how many of these books have I read" I've made a neat pile of books that I havn't read and started to add them to my reading list. So far I've found lots of great information that was right there on MY shelves all this time......yup, there was great stuff right in front of me, and I didn't even realize it.
Be Well and Keep 'em clean