How Do You Read?

I enjoy reading and write about books quite a bit. Growing up I read a lot, but that slowed when I went to college and got busy with a lot of other things. After college I settled into adult life, and picked up the habit again. 

When I started graduate school in 2010, I knew I would have a ton of school-related reading to do and I was afraid that this would cause me to dislike reading, but instead, the opposite happened: I now want to read all the time, and I have a long list of books to read in addition to my required reading for school. 

For most of my life, I have been a guy who read one book at a time. This trend changed in grad school where time constraints required me to overlap the books I was reading, and gradually I have come to enjoy reading multiple books at once. That being said, I realized last week that this Reading Multiple Books At Once thing has really gotten out of hand. 

Concurrently, I was reading:

• Two books on ministry in small churches
• Two books on youth ministry (actually I finished one and then immediately started and quickly finished another)
• One book on the history of Churches of Christ in the 20th century
• One book on biblical exegesis
• One book on Genesis
• One book of daily devotionals
• One book based on the sermons and writings of Archbishop Oscar Romero
• A lesson book on Ephesians for my Sunday morning Bible class
• The Bible (specifically, I am in Psalms right now)

Let me just say: this is a terrible way to read. My attention is so split that it is particularly difficult to remember exactly where I read something. I am also completely out of bookmarks (which are very necessary, since I have no way of remembering my place in 11 different books).

Furthermore, reading this many books simultaneously is not a sign that I am smart for being able to balance them; it is a sign that I am dumb for trying to do so in the first place!

By nature, a few of these books are part of my daily or weekly routine (Bible, devotionals, Bible class), but other than these, I’d like to get back to just reading 1-3 other books at a time.