I am a voracious reader, and lately at least, I am often reading between 20-40 books all at once. I pick up one, read 20 pages or so, and put it down. Then I pick up another one, read another 20 pages or so, and put it down too. It’s not really a problem for most nonfiction books and it works fine for books of essays and short stories. The poetry I read is often long narrative poetry where you have a single poem that goes on for an entire book of 200-300 pages. This method works well for these poetry books.
It is a bit of a problem with novels. I will admit it. You do tend to lose your place a bit and sometimes I just have to go back and start all the way over again. I think I am going to need to restart War and Peace and the Brothers Karamazov because I forgot what I read.
I do not know if this way of reading is stupid and sensible. It’s just the way I do it. It’s actually rather fun to read this way.
The list:
Total
- 33 books
Novels
- Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
- Feodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
- Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise
- Joyce Carol Oates, Because It Is Bitter and Because It Is My Heart
- Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land
- Tom Robbins, Still Live with Woodpecker
- John Rechy, Bodies and Souls
- John Updike, Until the End of Time
- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
- Herman Melville, Moby Dick
- Chuck Pahalunik, Invisible Monsters
- Franz Kafka, The Trial
- John Irving, Son of the Circus
- James Joyce, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Short Stories
- Joyce Carol Oates, Night-Side
- Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness
- Ernest Hemingway, The Complete Stories of Ernest Hemingway
- Flannery O’Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
- Daniel Francis Howard, The Western Tradition: An Anthology of Short Stories
Poetry
- John Milton, Paradise Lost
- Steven St. Vincent Benet, Western Star
Essays
- Loren Eisley, Night Country (science)
- Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (nature)
- Edward Abbey, Down the River (nature)
- Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon
- Barbara Kingsolver, High Tide in Tuscon
- Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years (nature)
- Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (cognitive science)
Unclassified Nonfiction
- Soren Kierkegaard, Either/Or (philosophy)
- Showan Khurshid, Knowledge Processing, Creativity and Politics (political science)
- Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy (philosophy)
- John Colapinto, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl (gender studies)
- John C. Greene, The Death of Adam: Evolution and Its Impact on Western Thought (science)
