It has been this: at any one time I have been reading number of books, usually along the following lines:
- a work of fiction (alternating between serious literature and lighter fare, such as a crime novel)
- a chemistry text or monograph
- a science book (not chemistry)
- a non-science non-fiction book (incl. biography)
- a Christian book
- anything else that I need to read for one reason or another (e.g. for teaching, research &c)
The advantages of this are several-fold:
- if you are deeply engrossed in a number of books, it encourages you to spend more time reading
- when you sit down to read, you have a choice of material to suit your mood or level of altertness (it's no good trying to read about quantum theory when you are tired - you want a nice Agatha Christie)
- you have a choice of volumes to take out with you for journeys &c (a heavy Dickens or biography is not ideal for putting in a bag you've got to carry round all day)
- plus it's just more interesting!
However the major disadvantage is that when there's a lot of pressure on your time it can be hard to keep the momentum going. When I was an undergraduate, I used to read for 3-4 hours a day or more. As a post-graduate it used to go in cycles, depending on how the labwork was going. Now that I'm starting teaching full-time, I think that I will very much less spare time to indulge this particular passion and so I think that I'm moving to reading one volume at a time. I hope that this will allow me to concentrate on it a bit more and feel like I'm making more progress. I may weaken on this resolve and keep a fiction and non-fiction going. But I'll try and just read one thing at a time.
If you read this blog regularly (who am I kidding??) then you should see the "Currently reading" panel dwindle away - but I'll leave the one's I've already started on there for now. From the previous post you can see that I've just finished the Hudson Taylor biog. I think that I will concentrate on the sunspots one next.
