How Do You Read?

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Two-timing, and more. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read.

https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/214365-how-many-books-do-you-read-at-a-time

How Do You Read?

By Ray Tabler.

How do you read books? That is, do you read one book at a time? Or do you have a number of books going all at once, skipping between as the mood takes you?

Personally, I have as many as 4 or 5 books in progress simultaneously. One gets to a slightly boring part, and I’ll switch to another. Or, some days a serious book which demands close attention and/or contemplation is too heavy a lift. Then, I’ll bale out for a fast, action-packed tale. That’s what I’ve found works for me. Your mileage may vary.

Surprisingly, hard data on this subject is tough to find. Anecdotal evidence abounds in the form of Reddit and Quora posts wherein people chime in to say how many bookmarks they currently employ. The sole numeric dataset unearthed was a Goodreads survey (see accompanying image). Extensive relevant information may exist, even be available. But this is all I could find with a casual web search. Not so casual, actually. I reworded search terms a number of times, but only succeeded in turning up items about “simultaneous reading,” i.e.  a 50-cent word for book clubs.

Keep in mind that Goodreads is already going to select for committed readers. And that there are only 102 respondents, which is technically enough to use statistics. But a number that small makes statisticians roll their eyes. Some data is better than no data. At least if you want to maintain some connection with reality. Not a given these days.

All that said, the results seem reasonable. Seventy percent of respondents have 1-5 books going at once. Another 14 % tip the scales at 5-10 books open at the same time. About 4 % skip between 2 & 3 books. Absolute book beasts claim 10-15. One individual reported more than 15. That’s plowing through books like the great white shark in Jaws buzz-sawed through swimmers.

Is holding a number of different narratives in your head at once is a form of multitasking? Maybe. I tend to look at it as eating a meal. First some meat. Then some potatoes.  A bite of green beans. When I was young, each food item on my plate had to be consumed in its entirety, in rigid sequence, before moving on to the next pile. And the foods could not be allowed to touch, let alone intermingle. I was a strange kid.

I outgrew that idiosyncrasy eventually. These days I’m likely to balance meat, potatoes, and green beans on the same fork full, if I don’t mix the whole plate together in one convenient mass. That’s probably significant for any psychiatrists reading this. But, I’m too tightfisted to pay dozens or hundreds of dollars per hour to find out what it means. On second thought, it might be interesting to spill my guts to a range of cheap and expensive shrinks, just to find out if more money buys more mental health.

It seems to me that how many books a person is reading at once is a distinctly different number than the infamous to-be-read pile (TBR). The TBR is a seething mass of works, marinating in guilt for not being more diligent and efficient. Most of the TBR will never be cracked open, to be honest. It’s stuff we feel like we should get to, but almost never do. You have to get past at least the first chapter before a book rises out of the TBR morass and achieves a spot on the in-progress list. Of course, being in-progress doesn’t guarantee the book will remain at that exalted position. Sadly, a boring read, more interesting other books, or even random extraneous life events can all nudge a book back into the TBR quicksand. Often never to be opened again. A tragic fate.

The advent of the e-reader has ushered in a whole new era of multi-volume multitasking. In days gone by, a sheaf of printed dead tree remnants had to be physically hauled about in order to facilitate reading. Which limited how many books could be in-progress at any one point in time.

No longer! Now, you can tote as many books as can fit in the gigabytes of your e-reader. Hundreds and hundreds! Assuming Amazon doesn’t revise their terms and conditions again. I suspect their end goal lies somewhere in the neighborhood of mortgaging your home in order to rent content by the page, perhaps by the paragraph.

Predatory practices aside, there are likely dozens of one third- to half-finished books languishing in the bowels of my Kindle. Occasionally I will happen upon them, forlorn and forgotten way down the list. Unusually this occurs when transferring to a new e-reader, a situation which I face with disappointing regularity. Apparently, Kindles have achieved peak planned obsolescence.

Oh, didn’t I finish this one? I’ll have to remember, and get back to it. Glug, glug, as the poor unfortunate book sinks from sight into the TBR quicksand.

END.

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