Coffee time: On reading multiple books at once

Hello! Today is the start of a new type of post – coffee times! Basically they’ll be discussion posts because you, me and the entire universe knows that the likelihood of me drinking coffee while writing these things is 99.9%. If not coffee, then it’s alcohol, but that’s a whole different kind of discussion. Anyways, these’ll happen whenever I come up with content for them. 😛 I have done a few of these in the past, but I didn’t have the catchy title at the time. My personal favorite is On Borrowing Books: A Harrowing Tale of Betrayal. So if you’re interested in my being dramatic, go read that one.

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I decided to write this post because usually I read two to three books at once: An audio book for the car, a physical book, and maybe a second physical book if I have a buddy read going on. That’s it, max three books. But looking at my Currently Reading Shelf on goodreads, right now I’m reading seven books. In addition to that, the Borrowathon readathon starts today, so I’ll be picking up a bunch of manga this week too.

So, this is way above my norm and honestly I’m a bit intimidated by it.

• Black Powder War by Naomi Novik is my one audio book. That hasn’t changed.
• Fool’s Fate by Robin Hobb is my buddy read book, currently reading it with Zezee
• House of Leaves by Mark Z Danielewski was my one physical book…. then it put me into a reading slump. Currently I’m about 60% through it, judging by the bookmark placement.

And this reading slump lasted a whole month – I picked the book up in January or February and then March was an awful reading month for me because of it. I didn’t really read anything, aside from audio books during my commute. And this is when I started thinking about reading multiple books at once.

I knew I didn’t want to DNF House of Leaves, and I still don’t. I do like it when I can get myself to read it, but it’s definitely one of the most challenging books I’ve read, so my pacing is very slow.

After the slump month and having to write a wrap up of ‘I did literally nothing’, I figured I should break my own rule.

• The Blood Mirror by Brent Weeks was the book I decided to pick up. I figured that if I was going to pick up a new book outside of my normal number, that it would at least be one on my ’10 in 2018′ list. So now I’m about 100 or so pages into that…
• The Flood by William Dietz is the next book I picked up. I borrowed it from a friend. Well, the friend lent it with a ‘READ IT READ IT’ heavily implied, so I was kinda pressured into picking it up quickly. I have a lot of books borrowed right now, but this guy was insistent that I read his book immediately, so here we are, book number five. I’m enjoying it so far, but am only reading it during my lunch breaks at work.

• A River in Darkness: One Man’s Escape from North Korea by Masaji Ishikawa I then picked up on my kindle app. Why, I don’t know. Recently I got Amazon Prime as part of the family plan and the kindle started popping up notifications going ‘hey you get a free ebook every so often’, so guess who picked up this ebook and is now reading it. I read it… mostly when I’m having slow moments or hiding in the bathroom at work. 😛 So this is definitely my slowest read. It’s good though!

• A Court of Frost and Starlight by Sarah J Maas… this one is the last and most recent one I added to my Currently Reading list. And honestly it’s just from my lack of impulse control. I bought this very recently and with me participating in Bout of Books (ending today) I wanted to read something I knew I could buzz through. And while I like all the books listed above, they’re not exactly ones that I fly through. So I started this one and am now half way through it. So for it’s uh… it’s decent. It’s very fan servicey.

And then today is the start of Borrowathon so a bunch of borrowed manga will be read. The list just keeps getting bigger.

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So right now my currently reading list is huge and it’s becoming hard to prioritize which to pick up. Eventually it’ll get back down to a manageable level, but I just… found it odd that when I broke my limit for one book that magically three more on top of that got added in.

I mean I’m not complaining per say – I’m enjoying all the books I’m reading. It’s just… a lot, haha.

So, is this something you do as well? Do you have a strict one book at a time policy or maybe are you in the middle of ten books? What would your ideal be? I think mine is probably three books, where I had it before. I don’t want to DNF any of these though, so they’ll slowly be marked off the list. Hopefully the urge to pick up another one in the mean time won’t happen. 😛