How we choose what to read: the jar, the veto and the long list

01The jar, and why paper beat the spreadsheet

For our first year we kept a shared list on somebody's laptop, and it behaved exactly as shared lists do. The person who typed fastest chose most often, the suggestions at the bottom were never read, and the whole thing slowly acquired forty-one titles that nobody could remember proposing. When the laptop went in for repair, we lost the lot, and the loss was a relief. The following month a large glass jar appeared on the table with a stack of paper slips beside it, and that jar has run the circle ever since.

A slip carries three things: the title, the proposer's initials, and one sentence explaining why. That sentence does most of the work. It stops us proposing books out of duty, because writing down why you want a book forces you to discover whether you actually do. Slips are folded once and dropped in. At the close of each meeting we draw three, read the sentences aloud, and take a show of hands. The whole business lasts four minutes and has never once become an argument.

02Three drawn, one chosen, two returned

Drawing three rather than one is the part that matters. A single slip makes the month feel imposed, and a full vote across every title in the jar makes the evening drag and rewards whoever campaigns hardest. Three gives a genuine choice without turning the last quarter of an hour into a committee meeting. The two unchosen slips go back into the jar rather than into the bin, which means a good suggestion keeps circulating and may well win in February what it lost in October.

We do keep a light hand on the tiller. If the last two months have both been long nineteenth-century novels, the person drawing will quietly say so, and somebody usually proposes something short before the slips are opened. This is the only steering anyone does, and it is announced rather than exercised in private. Nobody has ever objected to being told that we are all rather tired and could do with three hundred pages instead of nine hundred.

• One slip: title, initials, one sentence of why.
• Three slips drawn at the end of each meeting.
• Show of hands, no speeches, four minutes.
• The two unchosen slips go back in the jar.

03The veto, used twice in three years

Everyone holds one veto, and it needs no explanation. You say the word, the slip goes back, and nobody asks why. We wrote this rule on the inside cover of the notebook in the first winter, after an evening where somebody had plainly had a wretched time with a book for reasons that were clearly not literary and clearly not ours to enquire about. Having a formal way to step aside turned out to be kinder than the informal shrugging that preceded it.

In three years the veto has been used twice, and on both occasions the meeting simply moved on to the next slip within about ten seconds. That is rather the point. A rule that is barely used is not a wasted rule; it is a rule doing its work by existing. People read more freely when they know there is a door, and the door has stayed almost entirely shut.

04What we have learned about our own taste

Looking back over the notebook, the jar has given us a broader diet than any of us would have managed alone. Left to ourselves we each have a rut, and they are all different ruts, which is the useful part. The circle has read a good deal of nineteenth-century fiction, a surprising amount in translation, two volumes of letters, one long book about canals that divided the room, and the collected ghost stories that carried us through the January of the burst pipe.

The one adjustment we made was to the length of the month. Three hundred pages is comfortable, five hundred is work, and anything longer wants splitting across two meetings with an agreed stopping point. We now mark long books on the slip with a small L, and whoever draws it says so aloud. Pretending that everyone has unlimited evenings is the quickest way to lose half a circle by March.