Are you a one-book-at-a-time person?

My kindle currently has two books open on it and another one stands half read on my bedside table. And that is quite strange. Strange, because usually I am a one-book-at-a-time person. If I like a book I immerse myself in it, I lose myself in it, I think about it even when I’m not reading it. If I don’t like it much I want to finish with it fast so I can go on to another one.

(Of course the sensible thing to do is to just leave that bad book and move on but that’s not quite me. An unfinished book preys on my mind. It nags me demanding closure, asking for its ‘The End’. But more on that later.)

The point I’m trying to make is that I like to read one book at a time. It might have something to do with the fact that I mostly read fiction. Perhaps non-fiction readers can read more than one – absorbing and internalising and maybe even practising them – bit by bit while they read another one on the side.

I have a friend who simultaneously reads one book on fiction and another non-fiction. The latter keeps him company during the day – while he’s at breakfast or while travelling to and from work – and the former is his bed-time leisure read.

That works for him. It is perhaps the sign of a sane, balanced person.

However, that’s exactly what I am not — sane and balanced — when I get a good book . A good book erodes my sense of balance. A great book, does away with it completely. To me fiction most definitely needs to be read at one go; in one sitting if life permits. How else do you enter a world or a life, make it your own and love and laugh with the people in the book?

How can you jump from the company of three men in a boat on River Thames in London to Karan Johar’s Bollywood – those being my two current reads.

Nope – I have to put one of them on hold. I am most certainly a one-book-at-a-time person and happy being so.

Do you like to have more than one book on your bedside table?