I Love Multi-Booking: Reading More Than 1 Book At A Time

I love to read multiple books at the same time. I prefer to have at least one fiction and one non-fiction book on totally different subjects so that it is not too confusing.

Multi-Booking

In Sara Nelson’s wonderful book So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading, she calls reading two books at the same time “double-booking”.

This is nothing new for me. I call it Multi-Booking.

Sometimes I am so eager to read every book ever written that I am reading too many books at the same time.

Right now I am reading at least four books. One for the bathroom, two for the nightstand, and one for my purse.

The important thing is not to read books that are too similar to each other or it might get confusing!

I Am Not The Only One

Book Riot has discussed this topic in The Magic of Reading More Than One Book at a Time.

As Laura Sackton writes:

I used to have a strict one-book-at-a-time policy. I don’t know where this rule came from, but I refused to let myself start a new book until I’d finished the current one. This worked out fine until I started a book that wasn’t a quick read, and then I’d find myself in a frustrating reading slump. I’d get stuck in a book and go for weeks without reading, feeling resentful of the blameless book and generally grumpy, because reading is a major part of my mental well-being.

She continues:

Not only that, but the rule kept me from reading nonfiction (which takes me longer to finish than fiction), and it scared me away from starting anything over 550 pages or remotely challenging. I have started Moby-Dick three times and still never finished it, despite loving the ~150 pages I’ve read. I don’t know why it took me almost thirty years to lose the one-book-at-a-time shackles. When I finally realized that reading multiple books at the same time wasn’t stressful, but liberating, it changed everything

So it can be liberating to read more than one book at a time.

I totally agree.

Please also read Confessions Of A Book Blogger.

Thank you for reading The Literary Lioness!