Sixteen Ways to Read Sixteen Books

I thought I might talk about why I took Jo Walton’s example and started reading 16 books at the same time, as well as why I might recommended this system, or a personalized variation on it, to other people. Some other people! It is certainly not one-size-fits-all.

I adopted this system because I have many interests, and which of those interests I am currently in the mood to pursue is liable to change on short notice. I would pick up the book I’d been reading, filled slightly with dread, put it back down, and read again and again the backs of the other books continuing to pile up on my TBR. When can I start these, I’d ask myself? When I finish this one! Ugh! How could I at once be so uninterested in reading and so impatient to read?

I realize now this was the feeling of no longer being interested—or not primarily interested, not solely interested—in the subject or the mood or the style of that specific book. I wanted to read, but I wanted to read something else, and I had this old-fashioned instinct that I needed to finish what I was currently reading before I could do so. This produced a feeling of stalemate, and I would give up reading entirely until the mood to continue my current book returned, or until I sheepishly DNF’d it and tried something else.

This stalemate feeling has left me entirely now. When I pick up my e-reader, sometimes I continue reading the book I had been reading before, but sometimes it leaves me cold. My first impulse is to put the e-reader back down and look for something else to do, but I am learning to check that impulse and open the Currently Reading collection instead, to see if any of the other fifteen books in it interest me. So far, they always have. My reading has taken off tremendously.

Let’s look at the data, courtesy StoryGraph:

And this doesn’t even include the unlogged pages of books I’m making great progress on, but have yet to finish.

To recap: the system is not merely to continue starting books until I reach 16, and then to insist on finishing at least one of them before starting any others; it is to have sixteen categories or slots of books, that match my most common reading moods and interests, and to make sure I always have something that will capture the interest I happen to be feeling at the time.

Before this system, if my mood changed in the middle of a book, I would daydream about the unstarted books that matched that feeling, and suddenly become impatient to finish a book that I wasn’t even currently enjoying. It was a frustrating feeling. I would not ask anyone to take up this system who does not experience this feeling. If you like reading one book at a time, if that system works for you, then I encourage you to do continue doing so.

However, if you find yourself frustrated with reading one book at a time, finding yourself going days without reading at all because your current read doesn’t grab you, all the while gazing longingly at your TBR…

Give it a shot.

As I mentioned in my last post on this subject, shortly after I devised my own system based on Jo Walton’s tantalizing hints, she revealed all on her Reactor column. You should go read it, because she’s a good and funny writer, but I will summarize her system in a way that makes it easy to compare to mine. Slots that are the same in both are matched with dingbats:

There are also books on her list that map easily to my categories—I would put a traditional epic or piece of Greek/Latin literature in the humanities, and I’d put travel memoirs in with other memoirs in 15/16.

Additionally, Jo Walton adds two constraints on these 16 books: one of the non-fiction books is one she is reading “fast”, i.e. at the same pace as the two novels, and at least one in any category is translated from a language other than Greek or Latin.

Her fiction/non-fiction split is 4-12, versus my 8-8. I was intrigued that she made the same distinction between collections and anthologies—not that she knows the difference, which I expected, but that she keeps them as distinct categories in her reading. I cannot take full credit for my own usage—my original distinction was between “long” books of short stories and “short” ones, and it happened that they split along collection/anthology lines, and people I was explaining the system tt inferred that that was the distinction, which I decided made more sense.

She has two books of poetry going at any time; more than one person I explained my system to asked where poetry fit in. I can only say that I am a Philistine and poetry apart from light verse is a mystery to me. All of my Ogden Nash is in hard copy, so it doesn’t count in this system anyway.

I brought up the Harvard Classics in my previous post as something that might replace my current phone-read; I see her dedication to the cause is greater than mine.

So that is how the system I designed compares to Jo Walton’s to-me-at-the-time-mysterious original. More similarities than differences, but as noted by a friend of mine, the binary tree did not have to be balanced.

You don’t need to follow either mine or hers; there could be more variations still! I note we are both using this system with our e-readers, because carrying sixteen books around sounds like quite a hassle, but for a reader somewhat less flighty than I, one could have all sixteen tidily arranged on one’s bedside table, and choose one each morning to take with you out into the wide world, if indeed going out into the wide world on a daily basis is still something you find yourself doing.

My esteemed colleague Chris McMillen, Whatnot’s inimitable cmacfin, has his own system: in his basement he has sev

Of course, you may not need sixteen; or you may want twenty-four. I am sure my system will undergo revision as it makes contact with reality, and this may even been true of Jo Walton’s. All I am really doing in this post is giving you permission to try something out, to tell you that despite the linear way in which reading was assigned to us in school, a little orderly chaos may suit your temperament more, and you can and should embrace that if it is helpful to you. The numbers suggest it is enormously helpful to me. I should buy Jo Walton some flowers.eral piles of To-Be-Read in the various genres of his interest: when he chooses a book to read, it goes upstairs, to the bedroom or the study or whatever room he does his reading in, to sit in a stack with the representatives of each interest pile. Books finished are taken into deep storage, or sold, I suppose, and the newly emptied space is refreshed from the basement shelves.

Of course, let’s say you are a reader of narrower interests: perhaps, like many modern readers, you specialize in one genre. Well, this is no obstacle to reading many books at once. If, like Jo Walton and I, you wish not to confuse books that are too similar, you can divide your currently reading into subgenres:

Of course, you may not need sixteen; or you may want twenty-four. I am sure my system will undergo revision as it makes contact with reality, and this may even been true of Jo Walton’s. All I am really doing in this post is giving you permission to try something out, to tell you that despite the linear way in which reading was assigned to us in school, a little orderly chaos may suit your temperament more, and you can and should embrace that if it is helpful to you. The numbers suggest it is enormously helpful to me. I should buy Jo Walton some flowers.