This is the question that Writer Jen Doll of The Atlantic Wire asks after being inspired by The New Yorker’s Page-Turner Columnist Mark O’Connell’s confession of
“his dirty little reading secret: He doesn’t finish books; he’s a ‘promiscuous reader,’ a book abandoner. He writes, ‘I’ll start a book, get about halfway through it, and then, even if I’m enjoying it, put it down in favor of something else.’ But it’s not the books, it’s him. ‘I like reading too much. I can’t say no,’ he writes. ‘I’ll be reading a novel and thoroughly enjoying it. Then I’ll be in a bookshop and I’ll see something I’ve been anticipating, and I’ll buy it. I’ll start reading the new book on the bus home that evening, and that will be the end of the original affair. I’m certainly invested in the relationship with the book that I’m currently reading, but I can’t help myself from pursuing whatever new interest happens to turn my head. Perhaps that’s just a tortuous way of admitting to being a pathetic serial book-adulterer who’ll chase after anything in a dust jacket.’
He justifies his behavior in the end, as you’d expect of a ‘book cheater,’ by saying that maybe occasionally this is a good thing. When he finally meets the book whose fickleness meets his own, well, perhaps he’s met his match.
We understand. We, too, have occasionally set one good book down and picked up another, and forgotten the first nearly entirely, even though we’d been quite smitten with it before. Sometimes we engage in threeways, fourways, or even orgies of reading, in which there are so many books involved, well, we might not even be keeping track. It’s horrible, isn’t it? But, for as many books as exist, there are also any number of different reading types a book lover (or even a book hater) might demonstrate. What kind are you?
LINK: VISIT HERE
Rather than see myself as a promiscuous reader, I see myself as a Multi-Tasker.
The Multi-Tasker. This is the nice way of saying you are a promiscuous reader, but it’s not that you don’t finish reads. Instead, you just have a sort of hippie reading way about you, free love or some such. You might start the day out with a few pages from one novelist, then read something entirely different on the subway, and when you come home from work, another work as well. Your bedtime read, too, might be different, and all in all, when you count up the books, you’ve got quite a lot of irons in the fire all at the same time. Do you confuse characters or plots? Do you give more attention to some books than to others? Perhaps. The point is, you’re not ready for a book commitment just yet, and you’re doing a brilliant job dating them all in the meantime. Suggested multi-tasking reads: Short story and essay collections, novellas.
