For a bit over a year I've been using a system of single-tracking my nonfiction reading, only ever having one book on the go at a time, and not stopping until I finish or formally decide to abandon the book. I now think this is a bad idea.
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It treats reading time as more interchangeable than it actually is. Sometimes I don't have the intellectual capacity or emotional resilience to read a particular book, but could still be reading. Having a specific book I "have" to read if I'm reading means that I won't read then.
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e.g. I've been reading Matthew Ratcliffe's "Feelings of Being" for a while (a few weeks?) now. It's good but it's quite hard work, so a lot of the time I'm not able to deal with it, and it acts as a denial of service attack on my reading as a result.
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Similarly I often read therapy books, and you really need to be in the right emotional state to do that.
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A boring pragmatic issue is that sometimes books are really huge and I don't want to put them in my bag.
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I haven't quite decided what the new system is. I do like the way the single-tracking forces my hand on deciding to read or not read a book. Maybe I can only add another book to the in progress pile if I'm not currently able to read any of the books already there.
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Replying to @DRMacIver
Do you need your hand forced? (Posed for you to ask yourself, not for me to get an answer). From my perspective it seems like a lot of self-imposed rules. Not my business why you have them, just sharing that I don't have them.
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Replying to @GailOllis
It's useful to keep the work in progress queue bounded because I feel vaguely guilty if I have a large number of unread books.
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Why do you feel guilty about it? Serious question
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Replying to @imhinesmi @GailOllis
Hmm. Good question. Can't answer it at the moment
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