thinkfetti

I have a lot of books going. (You can see just how many - and which ones - by looking at my “my reading list” page) Part of the reason for this is that I buy books for various reasons: when I need them, when I’ve seen them at someone else’s house and picked them up for a minute or an hour and decided I need them, when I know I’m supposed to be professionally interested in them and would feel too guilty if I didn’t buy them, when the cover or the topic or a randomly-selected page convinces me I would be happier with the book than without.

That’s the input side.

The processing side (oh, let’s just call it reading) is frequently hamstrung by my general lack of available time, or, more accurately, by the fact that I spend most of my available time working on other big and little projects. So I don’t finish books in one sit-down-block-of-time. This is another part of the reason for so many books-in-progress.

A third reason is that I have as many intellectual moods as I do emotional moods (if not more), so I feel most comfortable when I have just the right book around for my current intellectual mood.

So it’s quite a stack. This way of threaded reading isn’t particularly efficient, but I am pleased to know that efficiency isn’t as high on my list as suggestive, cross-fertilizing prose and poetry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 6:34 pm and is filed under reading. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.