My literary inbox

Although I really don't have time to spend a month reading Herman Melville, I can identify with the feelings expressed in this post about how Internet use changes one's reading habits. At the moment I'm working on books by Ian Rankin and Peter Carey and according to Goodreads I'm reading a book about digital music by Greg Kot that I haven't even started yet. (About Last Night)

It's the observation that the Internet for all its virtues -- and let me interject here and say that I love the Internet, some of my best friends are the Internet, etc. -- has given me an overly inflated sense of my own ability to learn and appreciate new things. I've always liked to read several books at once (do you want to read a book about volcanoes tonight, or a novel? Who knows? Better have them both with you!), but this weekend I counted and I had some twenty books in different stages of being read around the house, ones I felt I couldn't bear to return to the library or put back on their proper shelves because "I'm reading it." I've fallen into the habit of bringing a stack of three to four into bed with me at night -- picking them up from around the house as I turn off lights like a grocery shopper ambling through the produce section picking whatever pretty fruit strikes the fancy.