On Reading Many Books at Once

Photo credit: Dvortygirl on Flickr

I used to be the kind of reader who could only read one book at a time. I'd often binge read and get through a book quickly—especially if I was enjoying it, especially especially if I was enjoying it and eager to read another book—but one book at a time was a firm rule for me.

Then I started doing literature programs in college and I didn't have the luxury of sticking to my one book at a time rule.

Granted, I suppose I could have added all the pages I needed to read in a week (adding together the page counts of the books I needed to read) and then gone through one book at a time that way, but for some reason I've found it's less daunting to read 50 pages of one book and 30 pages of another book and 35 pages of yet another book than it is to read 115 pages of a single book. Which is silly, I know, because I'm reading 115 pages a day either way, but it doesn't feel like it as much as it would if I was reading that amount from a single book.

After I broke that rule initially years ago now, I started occasionally pleasure-reading multiple books at once, oftentimes because I'd get a book I was really excited about and couldn't wait to read so I'd dive into that one while still reading another one. It's not something I did often but...#noregrets.

The other thing book hopping allows me to do is get through books I'm not enjoying as much (a necessity, in literature programs because invariably there will be books I have to read I'm not really into) in bite-sized pieces. I'll tell myself, okay, I'll read 50 pages of this book I don't love first, then I'll get to read 65 pages of those other books I do like. 

Granted, reading several books at once means it takes me longer to finish all of them—but it evens out because I end up finishing a bunch of them within a couple days as I near the end of every book around the same time.

Moving to reading a bunch of books at once has actually been easier than I anticipated, although it's quickly becoming clear to me that pleasure reading is a thing that's probably going to be rare as long as I have three (or more) books in a week to read for school. But that's okay—I'm reading lots of books I probably wouldn't have otherwise—or at least wouldn't have so soon. And that's certainly not a bad thing.

Do you read multiple books at once? 

Twitter-sized bites:

Do you read multiple books at once? Join the discussion on @Ava_Jae's blog. (Click to tweet)