Thanks to Dorothy for posting a link to this article! It is always nice to know you are not the only obsessive person when it comes to the number of books that happen to sit on your current reads pile! Yes, I can relate:
"Like any addiction, the insatiable desire to start new books provides immense pleasure."
And this is so true, too:
"Friends say that I suffer from a short attention span, but exactly the opposite is true. I do not stop reading books because I lose interest in them; if anything, I have too long an attention span, one that allows me to read dozens of books simultaneously without losing interest in any of them."
Yes, there are so many interesting books out there it is hard to say no. I wish I could be more practical. Limit myself to no more than say, five books at once. And maybe even that sounds like too many. And I always tell myself no new books until I finish two or three from the pile that I am reading at the moment. And usually I can stick with that. But the problem is that when I have finished those two or three, rather than starting one new one, I end up starting three! And lately I have encountered the problem of so many books discussing one topic that I am very into at the moment. I want to devour them all at once rather than one at a time. I guess I will always try and reform my reading habits, but in the end I succumb to the temptation of a new book.
Case in point. I told myself that I could start a new library book (see photo above) after I finished Kept and returned it to the library, and when I finished my new Maisie Dobbs book as well. Well, Kept is done and Maisie is nearly finished (and am thoroughly enjoying by the way). However, I managed to sneak a book into my sidebar list without so much as a bat of the eye (that would be Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own---but how can I talk about her without wanting to dig in and read her?). Do you think this is going to stop me from looking over the (far too tall) stack of library books and starting one of them, too? Need I even answer that one?
And if you are curious...I have the library book selection down to: Unveiling by Suzanne Wolfe, In Lucia's Eyes by Arthur Japin and Tamburlaine Must Die by Louise Welsh. Of course I might change my mind. I still have 100 pages to go of Maisie before I decide.
And as Joe Queenan said (and I think this applies just as much to starting another book):
“I’m already reading 25 other books, so why am I buying this one?” I asked a friend. “Do you think this is a disease?”
“Yes,” interjected the cashier. “But it’s a good disease to have.”