📚 Current Reading Strategy aka Why Four Books at Once?

December 1, 2022 📚

I was going through my Goodreads (and Epilogue), logging some stuff, sorting through some others, and I realized a pattern with my reading. It’s not always like this, but for the most part, I usually have about four books going at a time. And for good reason (at least I think so).

The breakdown looks like this:

  1. A kindle book - fiction
  2. A real1 book - fiction
  3. An audiobook - non-fiction
  4. A nighttime partner audiobook - non-fiction

While I love my kindle and am always in the middle of something on it, it still doesn’t have the same feeling as reading a real book. I’ll often fly through a bunch of books consecutively on my kindle and then all of a sudden fall out of the habit. At that point, I can be in the middle of a book not pick it up again for ages. Even if it’s a good book! That’s where having a real paperback/hardcover around comes into play. The paper and tactile nature of a real book pulls me in and gets me hooked once again. Just the act of starting a real book creates a whirlwind of events where I’m all of sudden in the middle of multiple books, picking them all up on a daily basis. Bliss.

Then there is the delineation between fiction and non-fiction, and written words vs audiobooks. I’ve found I can sometimes struggle to read certain non-fiction books, even those I love, and at the same time, I struggle to listen to fiction books — oftentimes zoning out at what feels like a critical juncture and then being lost for the rest of the book. So I came to the pretty simple conclusion to always read fiction with my eyeballs and (almost) always read non-fiction with my earholes.

Lastly, as the wife and I start to wrap up the day, I’ll often throw on a podcast or audiobook for us to listen to together. The Film Cast has been a common one for us, especially after we’ve watched something, but more recently I’ve been trying to move towards audiobooks for these moments instead. Typically, this will be something along the lines of a comedy/memoir. We’ve done Yearbook by Seth Rogan and Becoming by Michelle Obama and are now currently working through Where the Deer and the Antelope Play by Nick Offerman. This is still relatively new and there are times where I’ll be out cold within five minutes of throwing something on so the jury is out if this is the right tactic to take…

Anyways…

Books and words and paper, oh my..?!?!


  1. only using the term real” in this sense to denote physical” such as a hardcover or paperback - kindle books are real books too 😝↩︎


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