Reading tracks

Inspired by Jo Walton’s post about reading sixteen books at once, here are my own reading habits, for those who have trouble falling asleep at night.

I generally read between four and ten books at a time, though at times it’s gone as low as two and as high as, uh, thirty. (Those were wild days.) For me it’s a balance between finishing books — where fewer at a time helps — and reading across more of my areas of interest in parallel.

Each day I try to read at least 100 pages. My loose goal is at least ten pages per book per day, though I’m not strict about that. I also try to read at least fifty pages per day from the main books I’m reading (usually either book club books or the ones I’m closest to finishing). Even long books like War & Peace melt away fairly quickly at fifty pages per day.

When I get near the end of a book (fewer than 150 pages left), I tend to switch to burndown mode where I focus only on that book and largely ignore the others (reading only a page or two from them per day, if that).

As of today, this is my list of reading tracks, which is how I divvy up my reading across genres. I usually try to read one book per track, but that’s not a hard and fast rule.

• Nonfiction, authors I’ve already read. Working through the bibliographies of authors I like, basically.
• Nonfiction, authors new to me. Which in practice means any nonfiction that isn’t already covered by one of the other nonfiction tracks.
• Old nonfiction. “Old” is defined loosely here but mostly means books one can find on Project Gutenberg.
• Biography/memoir. On these I try to alternate between modern and old (same meaning of “old” as above).
• Diaries and letters. I’ve split these up into their own tracks before and may do so again, but for now I flip between them.
• Classics. I try to switch between more serious classics (the Brontës, Tolstoy, Gaskell, Hardy, that kind of thing) and more “fun” classics — a designation I’m not totally happy with — like Anne of Green Gables, Dracula, The Secret Garden, and Phantom of the Opera.
• Modern lit. I tend to rotate through sf&f, lit fic, and historical fiction, though the genre lines are messy and I don’t worry much about which track a book ends up in since it’s the reading that matters. Sometimes I split sf&f out into its own track, but lately I’ve been less interested in it so I’ve consolidated.

The list is alive and changes frequently. It will no doubt change tomorrow, or even later today. I don’t know what that says about me.