Here’s a problem some of you probably share. I’ve got a stack of books lying around that I’ve been meaning to read. And there’ll be a handful I’m poking through at any given time. But often, when I decide I’m going to sit down and read for a while, the prospect of starting something new is more enticing than the prospect of picking back up one I’m already a quarter of the way through. But as new books get started, those I’d previously begun gradually get abandoned, until there’s a big ungainly pile of quarter-read books lying by the side of my bed. Actually finishing one becomes a nigh-miraculous occurence.
My solution is a book diet. I’m going to allow myself to have, at most, five going at any one time (not counting stuff I have to read for work), and I can’t start a new one until I’ve actually finished one of the ones in my cache. That’ll both make me more selective about what I pick up—I’d better intend to finish it!—and give me incentive to get through those I’ve started when I hit a slow part. Also, since this requires me to actually (at least mentally) have a list, rather than just some vague cluster of stuff I picked up and flipped through in recent memory, I’ll be more prone to actually think about reading related or mutually-illuminating books in parallel. I’ve just initated this cunning plan, so I’ll report back soon on how it’s working…
In the cache currently: Foucault’s Pendulum (Umberto Eco), Homage to Catalonia (George Orwell), Smart Mobs (Howard Rheingold), Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), and Technologies of Freedom (Ithiel de Sola Pool).
I kind of cheated and threw in the Orwell and Aurelius because they’re short and I’d already half finished them, which means that I can count on being done with them pretty soon, and in the meantime can think a bit more carefully about what should occupy those two precious slots. After that, I’d like to read the Sola Pool and Rheingold together, since they’re both about communications technology and social change (a pet interest), and the Eco, which is fairly thick, will be a nice fictional background theme to dip into from time to time. Oh, yeah… that’s another rule I just added this second. At least one of the five will have to be fiction, so I can get back in the habit. I think you could probably count the number of non-sci-fi novels I’ve read since sophomore year in college on the fingers of one hand. (That won’t stop me from replacing the Eco with William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, but every dieter need the occasional chocolate eclair…)
