Reading habits

I usually read two or three books at a time, flicking between them as the mood takes me. Because I also read quickly, I presume I read more than the average person. What this says about me I don’t know (‘intellectual colossus?’ or ‘could do with getting out more?’ Hmm)

Anyway, one of the books I’m re-reading at the moment is Stephen King’s excellent On Writing. It’s very interesting and a useful motivator – in it he gives his advice on how to write well and how to go about being the world's best selling novelist. Like everyone else who writes professionally, he says you have to read a lot. So far so good, but then he says he reads between 60 and 80 books a year. Perhaps he’s exaggerating, but even at 60, that’s 30 books every six months, 15 books every three months, five books a month. That’s a lot. (How does he even know? Does he have a quota and perhaps a wall chart maybe? Anyway . . .)

I wonder if he re-reads? I re-read a lot, although the book has to be of a certain quality for me to care enough to do so. Some I re-read because I know I skimmed some on the first read and I know I missed somestuff, some because I enjoy re-immersing myself in that world and some because I re-read them at least once a year for nostalgic reasons, like The Lord of the Rings.

My house is crammed full of books – I hoard them the way Imelda Marcos hoards shoes. One day I’ll get around the having a grand cull – to get rid of all the crappy books I know I will never crack open again. I get slightly nervous and sweaty palmed at the thought of throwing any book out, but frankly I’m running out of space for the good books I will probably re-read, so it will have to be done.

King’s 60 books statistic made me wonder how many books I read a year? The most recent books I’ve read were:

Empire, Orson Scott Card (just started this, it arrived this morning)
Childhood’s End, Arthur C Clarke
Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett
On Writing, Stephen King
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins
Why Don’t Penguin’s feet freeze? New Scientist compilation
Morrissey – Scandal and Passion, David Brett
Temeraire, Naomi Novik
Unbeaten Tracks in Japan, Bird
Priestess of the White, Trudi Canavan,
White Slave, Marco Pierre White
On Royalty, Jeremy Paxman
Jonathon Strange & Mr Norrel, Susanna Clarke
Hellfire, Mia Gallagher
The Black Magician Trilogy, Trudi Canavan
The World Turned Upside Down - Medieval Japanese Society, Pierre François Souyri
The Runes of the Earth, The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen Donaldson

This takes me back to about July, but before that it starts to get a little fuzzy . . .