The page 40 test - a lame segue

I don't know if this can properly be called a superstition but I have a habit (courtesy of my dad, courtesy of a friend of his) of deciding whether or not to read a book based on how good page 40 is. (If page 40 is blank, then I go to the first text-ful (texty?) page thereafter.)

This practice has generally been sort of eerily accurate in predicting good books, with a few notable exceptions like Nikos Kanzantzakis's The Fratricides (and that was left unfinished before Kazantzakis died, so maybe if he'd had a chance to edit the novel, the whole thing would have lived up to page 40's promise.)


Of course, there's no telling how many good books I've missed out on because page 40 just happened to be not great, but I guess I've got to have some way of narrowing down what I read (besides generally scorning certain types of books I (perhaps unfairly) consider too much geared towards the great unwashed).

Anyway, I bring this test of mine up as a not very smooth segue into announcing a new feature I'll soon be launching on Bookphilia. com. For awhile now I've been thinking about how to bring other readers into the mix, and what I've come up with is an occasional feature I've decided to call The Reading Lamp; this will simply comprise interviews with other readers and photos of them with their current book. (FYI: this unsmooth and perhaps entirely unconvincing segue is based on the fact that one of the interview questions I've settled on is "Do you have any reading superstitions?")

Once I actually get a new camera I'll start posting these spotlights on other readers periodically and I'll be interested to see what y'all think. I suspect 99% of these interviews will be with people I know and guilt into it (as much as I'd just like to buttonhole people I see reading on public transit), but if you'd like to be featured this way, drop me an email at "colleen at bookphilia dot com" and we can discuss how to make it happen. Cheers!