I hate it when this happens. I really prefer reading one book at a time, but sometimes I get squirrelly.
- Fleming Rutledge, The Battle for Middle-Earth (surprisingly — to me — interesting and convincing)
- Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver
- Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome
- James Gleick, Isaac Newton
- Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish
Text Patterns
October 29, 2009
Perhaps a post on how you do your reading is due? 🙂 One book at a time? Three at a time (one fiction, one non-fiction, one pulp, etc.?) I still struggle at this, I dip into too many books at the same time and end up reading none of them. Just goes to show that "distraction" is true for books too as long as there're many of them around.
In lieu of a post, how about a comment? I tend to start something, and if it doesn't grab me immediately, set it down and try something else. Maybe then I go to a third book; after that I might return to the first one. I keep circling this way until one of them catches hold of me, and then I read that and that only until I'm done. Sometimes a book does grab me immediately, in which case I'm off to the races; other times I have to circle the block a few times, so to speak.
And whether it's fiction or nonfiction depends on what I'm in the mood for. For the past year or so I've been reading mainly history, especially the history of science.
Of course, all this is my leisure reading — there's a good bit of literary reading that I'm always doing for classes. And that's wonderful.
Now that I think about it, I suppose I;ve read more SF and fantasy in the past year than anything else.