"I'm also reading Paper, by Mark Kurlansky. And Island of the Blue Foxes, by Stephen Brown. And Coffeeland, by Augustine Sedegwick. And a dozen other books too, all at the same time. I also paused in the middle of reading all of those books to read, in its entirety, a history of The Cars, even though I was never that into The Cars."
"I aspire to read every book in full, in sequential order. That's how my wife reads books. That's how my colleagues are able to hold book club chats where everyone has read the book assigned. That's how everyone on Goodreads reads books, or at least how they front like they do. These people are faithful to their books. I am not."
"The Power Broker. I think that was the name of it. I'll get back around to Robert Caro's Pulitzer-winner eventually. For now though, it sits in my Kindle library, sharing low completion percentages with multiple other tomes, some of which I haven't picked back up in years."
The narrator describes an unconventional reading habit characterized by perpetual multitasking across numerous books simultaneously. While aspiring to complete ambitious works like Robert Caro's The Power Broker, the reader constantly abandons projects for new interests, jumping between dense investigations, histories, and fiction. This pattern includes pausing major works to read entire books on tangential topics like The Cars or MTV history. Books accumulate in various states of incompletion across Kindle and physical formats, with some unfinished for years. The narrator acknowledges this behavior deviates sharply from conventional reading practices, where most people complete books sequentially and maintain fidelity to single projects. The contrast highlights a fundamental difference in reading discipline and commitment.
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