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Reading rut

I’m in a reading rut. After my reading marathon in September I first did not pick up a book for 2 weeks, then went into a rereading cycle which is what I do to jump start myself when I temporarily lose interest in reading, and now I have fallen into an old familiar rut where I start reading one book after another but after the first session I don’t feel like reading any more of the book, put it down somewhere and start reading another book. And another. And another. It’s pathetic, but I can’t help it.

In addition to the usual half-dozen or so books I am reading page-by-page or chapter-by-chapter over a long time (3 years in one case, and I’m only halfway through), I have several of these start-stop books scattered around. The book that started the rut, Clive Barker’s Abarat, I put down when I discovered halfway through that it was the first episode in a 5 book series, the last of which is still being written. I think I will shelve it and not read it until the last book is published and I have them all together, because it’s the kind of story one wants to read all the way through in as few sessions as possible.

In the last seven days I have started to read and then put down one book a day, all of which are scattered around my apartment, asking to be finished, but I just continue to go and get more books. I loved the magic realism of Alice Hoffman’s The Probable Future and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Mistress of Spices, but found myself uninterested in picking either up again after reading about 20 pages of one and 100 of the other. Fortunately I think I have finally found one that can help me break out of the rut – it will become apparent when I go home this afternoon, but it’s looking good, because as I am writing this (during my lunch break at work) I am thinking about the book and that is always a good sign.
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