How To Read Sixteen Books at Once (At All Times) - Reactor

Before I had an e-reader I used to read only one book at a time like a sensible person, and I’d read all of it straight through. I still do this sometimes. If I want to just carry on reading one particular thing I will do it, and that’s what I mean when I write about a book in my monthly reading list here and say “I couldn’t put it down.” But once I got an e-reader I started to read in a different way. I’ve written before about how it’s the library in my pocket. I began to cycle through different books, reading a chapter of each. It’s possible for me to be reading too many things and so not get to read anything often enough, and with some experimenting, and because of the way the old Kindle interface used to work, I settled into reading sixteen things at a time because that feels like the right amount. I like it because it means I can read long boring books that I want to read but don’t want to read exclusively because they’re a slog. I like the way I can have poetry and letter collections in my daily reading without having nothing but that. I like reading a variety of things.

So how do I do it? I have a “collection” on my Kindle called “currently reading.” Somebody here on Reactor suggested this when I was furious that they changed the interface so that whatever you’d recently opened was at the top and things couldn’t be put away tidily and not interrupting the two pages of eight books each that I was actually reading. (Like everyone, I frequently look things up in books I have already read.) In “currently reading” there are always sixteen books, no more or less. When I start describing this it sounds ridiculously complicated, but it isn’t at all in practice. I’m not suggesting anyone else do this, it’s just what I like to do.

I read two novels, one mainstream and one science fiction or fantasy, and whenever I finish one of them I begin another, so I am constantly reading two novels. I make sure the novels are different from each other not just in genre but in feel and often time as well, so that they go together well by being different. For instance, last summer I was reading the Wolf Hall books, and I wanted to read Eifelheim but it felt too close, so I waited to start it until I was done with the Mantel. I also read a non-fiction book that I am reading “fast”—that is, at the same speed I am reading the novels. The non-fiction one of these three can be anything, just something interesting that I want to read.

I cycle through such that I read a chapter of one of these three books, then I read three other things, and then I read a chapter of another of these three books. So my sixteen is actually more like three plus thirteen. I get through those three much faster than everything else because I read them more frequently. When I sit down to read, I’ll usually read a chapter of one of these three things, say about ten minutes, then three of the other things, cumulatively about ten minutes, and then a chapter of the next of the three things, about ten minutes, and so on, so that in an hour of reading I’ll have read three chapters and nine little chunks. Bear in mind that if at any time I don’t want to stop reading something I won’t—if I ever feel like I don’t want to close a book and go on to the next I’ll just keep reading that one.

Of the thirteen other things, two of them are always short stories, usually a single author collection and an anthology with stories from multiple authors. Generally one will be science fiction or fantasy, and the other will be something else, mystery, mainstream, something. Occasionally I just have one short story collection and one classic novel. Again, I make sure they’re also not too close in feel and time to the novels I’m reading, so when I was reading the Christie ghost stories collection I didn’t read any other mystery, when I was reading an anthology of retold fairytales I didn’t read any other fantasy of that kind. So, of my sixteen things, four are always fiction, and I feel this is about the right proportion.

I read two books of poetry, again generally one by a single author and one anthology with poems by multiple authors. I read two letter collections, making sure they’re never from the same century, again so they feel different. I love letter collections, they’re such an interesting form and such a great way to really get to know someone. They’re one of the hardest things to find, oddly, and something where I always want recommendations.

I’m always reading something translated from Greek or Latin. Right now, and for a long time past (and I predict for a long time to come) my classics slot is filled with Pliny’s Natural History, which is very long but has very short entries. It’s like reading a two-thousand-year-old encyclopedia, and it’s simultaneously very boring and weirdly fascinating. It’ll be going on forever listing animals, and then it’ll suddenly say “And the first one seen at Rome was brought into the Colosseum by Nero…” and for a moment it’ll be like an outtake from I, Claudius in the middle of the encyclopedia. I’m also always reading at least one thing translated from a language that isn’t Greek or Latin.

I always read one “relevant”—that is, research—history book, and one “irrelevant”—that is, just for fun—history book. Actually, these are the most slippery categories, because I’m usually reading something that’s relevant for the papal election, and sometimes also something that’s research for a future novel that I may or may not write. These can also be biography or memoir.

Then there’s a travel memoir, which is something I really enjoy reading. And I am reading the “Harvard Shelf” which gives me an element of randomness, or at least choices I didn’t make myself. If I hate whatever it is, I skip on to the next thing.

I am always reading one epic from another culture. Separately, I am always reading a primary source. This is just something historical that’s an actual primary source, written at the time, not something written about history, later. It can be anything. At the moment it’s the Memoirs of Philip de Commines, Containing the Histories of Louis XI and Charles VIII of France, which is fascinating and which I feel like nobody else has read at all. (Which is one reason why reading primary sources is useful.) You can read a whole lot of secondary sources about a period and they pull things together and have perspective and see things, but sometimes they get into a loop where they’re all using the same primary sources, and indeed using the same translated bits of them, and there will be all kinds of other sources they don’t notice. So I wish I’d read Commines before I wrote Lent but oh well, and I am reading it now.

I also read something that is criticism or reviews or book history. Right now, I’m reading Arthur Ransome’s History of Story-Telling and before that I was reading the Robert Ebert collection for a long time.

And those of you who can count will see that this is eighteen categories! But it’s always sixteen books, because some categories overlap. The non-fiction book I am reading “fast” is also always in another category. And things in translation can overlap with any other category—they can be letters or poetry or short stories or novels or primary sources or epics. (Having said that, I’m often reading more than one translated thing, but that’s just good. The idea is to make sure I am reading at least one.) Epics are often poetry, and in translation, and so when I was reading the Ramayana it was in three categories at once.

When it works, this makes a lovely reading symphony where the different books are like different instruments coming together in contrast and harmony; when it doesn’t work it can be jarring, but that doesn’t happen all that much. What can happen is that I put in too many things in the category of “need to slog through it” and not enough that’s fun, and then I need to adjust. If I’m not enjoying something, anything, and if I don’t have to read it—if I’m not reading it specifically for research—I’ll stop reading. I don’t skim, as I’ve mentioned before. But as long as the overall mix is fun, then reading a few pages of something that’s objectively deadly dull is OK. I mentioned that all through the long time I was reading the Browning-Barrett correspondence I smiled every single time I saw the title in my list. If there’s something where I feel like I’m slogging through it (Pliny) but getting a weird kind of enjoyment out of it that’s fine, but if there’s something where I sigh every time I see it then I toss it back and read something else. I recently gave up on The Letters of St Ambrose because I wasn’t having fun.

As for how I select things to read, it’s the usual combination of leaping on new books from writers I like, recommendations from people (including people here), algorithms telling me about things, and completely fortuitous finds, with a tiny bit of publishers trying to get me to blurb things. (I almost never get anything I want from this last method, but I will sometimes try the book if it sounds promising. And occasionally, just occasionally, it will be great and I will be happy.) So I have a huge (196) queue of books sitting on my Kindle waiting to be read, and I have other books I know I want to re-read in the fairly near future. Whenever I finish a book, I find a book in that queue that’s in the right category and that feels like it fits with the rest of everything, and I slot it in. Another advantage of this method is that I rarely have the empty feeling of finishing a book and needing to find something else. I may have finished a book, but I still have fifteen other books on the go! If I finish something that’s in multiple categories and I replace it with something that doesn’t fill all of them, then a category will be unfilled for a little while until I finish something else. If I’m reading some relevant or irrelevant history book, or a travel book, and it’s unexpectedly terrific, it gets promoted into the “fast” slot—sometimes with the current fast book going back down into the slow, and sometimes when I finish the current fast book.

That’s it, really… it’s all perfectly simple.