Naomi's Books Always Arrive Unannounced

My sister Naomi has never once asked whether I want a book before mailing it to me. She lives a few states away now, we talk maybe every couple weeks, and every month or two a padded envelope shows up with no note inside, just a book, usually something I’d never have picked up on my own. I used to find this mildly presumptuous. I’ve stopped being able to defend that position, because her hit rate is uncomfortably high, high enough that I’ve started half suspecting she knows my own taste better than I do.

The pattern I’ve noticed, looking back through my log, is that Naomi’s picks skew toward exactly the books I’m most likely to be stubborn about avoiding on my own, dense literary stuff, translated work, things that don’t announce themselves as genre fiction and so never end up on whatever list actually brought them to my attention in the first place. Left to my own devices I default hard toward hard sci fi and the occasional dense nonfiction. Naomi’s envelopes are where almost everything outside that lane has come from the past few years, and several of the highest ratings in my whole log trace directly back to something she mailed me without asking.

I asked her once, on one of our calls, how she picks. She said she mostly just remembers things I’ve complained about wanting more of, offhand comments from months earlier that I’d completely forgotten making, and goes looking for something that scratches that specific itch. I complained once, apparently, about wanting a book that actually earned its scale instead of just being long for the sake of it, and a few weeks later a very dense, very deliberate novel showed up with no note, and it turned out to be exactly the kind of patient, demanding book I’d been describing without realizing I was asking for a recommendation.

There’s something in this that I think about more than the actual books, honestly, which is that Naomi’s clearly paying closer attention to the offhand version of me, the one complaining idly on a phone call about vague dissatisfactions, than I usually pay to myself. I log every book I finish in a grid on graph paper, rating and hours and all, treating my own taste like something I can track and quantify. She’s just been listening, casually, for years, and somehow gets a better read on what I actually want than my whole logging system does.

I still don’t know what’s coming next in the mail. That’s sort of the point, I’ve realized, and I’ve stopped trying to guess or pre-order things for myself in the same category, on the theory that whatever she sends will probably be better than whatever I’d have picked, and so far the log backs that theory up more often than not.