Multitasking for the literate

Agh, agh, agh. How is possible to be reading not one, not two, but THREE books at the same time?? Not to mention breaks for The Economist, Newsweek, The Hedgehog Review, and my local paper. It ought to be impossible. The sheer number of words beating on my skull ought to somehow cancel each other out, or the most interesting ones ought (by the law of survival of the fittest) to beat the %&*^ out of the other ones until they limp quietly away. And yet it does not happen. I lug multiple books to work with me, in the insane belief that in a 45-minute lunch hour I can somehow inhale all of them, or at least some of each of them. I pile them next to my bed at night, in the happy delusion that in the half hour between the time I lie down and the moment at which my eyelids acquire a weight of roughly 2.6 earth normal, I will wade through a chapter or two of each.

I need an intervention. Or an external hard drive I can plug into my head. Or something.

Currently I'm working on a ginormous behemoth of a book, Neil Stephenson's Anathem, which in addition to weighing about eight pounds has the dubious distinction of more made-up words per page than anything I've ever read anywhere, including Clockwork Orange. It's so brain-straining that I have to take breaks and work on the next Sandman volume. Which is short, so in between those I've got a new bio of Anne Boleyn -- yay! At least that one's vaguely topical since the Ren Fest is going on and we're there every weekend in garb. ("Say it now and say it loud, I'm a Rennie and I'm proud!")

So there you go. A little TMI about my addiction to the written word. Go stories! Go words!! Go narrative!!!