I’m going to start joining in with the Book Blogger Hop, hosted by Billy @ Coffee Addicted Writer. I’ve made my own image from a stock photo (credit: Anna Shvets) to avoid adding images created via generative AI to my blog. Feel free to use it too if you would like!

This week’s prompt is about dual-wielding books:

Do you read one book at a time, or juggle a few at once?

I am quite possibly incapable of reading just one book at once! I have a tendency to get fidgety, though this happens mostly with fiction: I get too antsy about how the story is going to turn out, and then instead of finding out, I get hung up on it. Sometimes the best thing to do in that case is just to switch to something else for a bit. I’d say three to five books at once is the sweet spot for me; each of them gets attention, but there’s plenty of variety.

Overall, I think it works best when I jump between quite different books — like, one historical non-fiction, one popular science, one fantasy, and one mystery, or something like that. Then the moods are very different, and there’s no risk of details blurring into each other.

That said, at the moment I’ve got myself into a bit of a hole with it! I have six books marked as “currently reading” on StoryGraph, which is okay… and thirty-two marked as “paused” because I got stalled on them. I’m working on it; I’ve got a bit of a system at the moment where I alternate starting new books and inducting paused books back into the pile — but it has got a bit overwhelming!