This article is an analysis of Wisława Szymborska’s style of reading used by the poet in her quasi-reviews collected in Lektury nadobowiązkowe Non-compulsory readings. The ludic poetics of the book is closely related to the author’s inclination towards curiosity and nonsense humour which expresses her typical “sense of oddness”. The aim of the reading is thus to reveal in radically diverse texts (a floristic compendium or a popular guidebook How to live more comfortably side by side with Montaigne’s Essays or Nietzsche’s Aphorisms) some uncommon details, humorous paradoxes and unexpected facts and incidents. Szymborska’s way of reading, animated by the spirit of a sophisticated play, has also its source in the historic concept of cabinets of curiosities, reflected here in the Bibliotheca Curiosa as well as in Julian Tuwim’s device cicer cum caule structuring his famous collection of “useless knowledge”.