ive been told i have a strange way of reading books. when i was younger in elementary school, a friend and i would try and one-up each other by seeing who could have the larger stack of books on their desk everyday. im not sure why we did it, but we were always competing to see who could read more, or who could read longer books with more pages, or who could read the most books as fast as possible. sidenote, but his parents were really strict and a few times outside of school we hung out and would take apart the national geographic almanacs and cut pages up to make our own.

even today im never reading just one book at once. i cant even tell you the last time ive finished reading an entire nonfiction book from start to finish - im not sure if thats ever happened. if im reading fiction ill pretty much always finish it unless i get bored, but i try and take what i can from a nonfiction book and read until i feel that ive extracted enough value.

right now im reading maybe 4-5 books on-and-off, with a mix of fiction and nonfiction because it's good to get a healthy balance of both:

intermezzo by sally rooney (recommended to me by coldhealing)

attention factory by matthew brennan

the world beyond your head by matthew b crawford

glamorama by bret easton ellis

if you're like most people ive met, you probably wonder how its even possible to read so many books at once. the answer is that its very possible and your brains are probably already conditioned to possess this ability too. its not hard to keep track of different plots across 2-3 books of fiction because more often than not, the writing styles are different and the plots are far from similar. the reason i say your brains are already conditioned to do this is because we spend so much time switching contexts everyday, and social media is really good at making us unable to focus on one individual thing.

im not reading multiple books simultaneously because they're boring, it's actually the opposite. there are too many good books and everyday i feel differently about what id like to be reading, so why put myself through the pain of only starting a new book after forcing myself to read through a single book start to finish.

i choose to read so many books at once because my ideas for writing change daily and its hard to keep focus on a single idea. id say since i wrote the depin report, the only topic i really feel passionate about writing more on is TikTok, specifically why i hate it, and why i think its damaging our attention spans. through reading 'the world beyond your head' ive been able to better develop my thesis on attention, which i never could have done without taking the time to switch from 'attention factory' (a story specifically about bytedance & tiktok) to a book that's purely devoted to attention.

maybe theres a better way of reading, but this is my way. in the future ill try to contain myself, but its impossible not to get excited everytime i start a new book or think about starting one. i just cant help it and thats okay, we dont need to be completionists.