The Making of a Multi-Tasking Reader

I started reading early. I was the favorite babysitting gig in town, because I sat there reading all night and needed very little attention. My father claims that my horrible eyesight is the result of reading in any and all lighting conditions, including the light of passing street lights from the back seat of our brown station wagon, or the flickering glow of a flashlight in need of new batteries and hidden under the tulip-printed comforter of my bed.

I'd spend every summer peddling my bicycle back and forth to the public library to check out more books, or walking through the neighborhood to the brand new Waldenbooks store they opened in the nearest strip mall. I usually had a few books waiting in the wings, but not many, and I never read more than one book at a time.

And then we started reading "literature" in school.

In the fourth grade, they wanted us to read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, a book that sounded sorta interesting, but I was in the middle of reading something else at home. "No matter," I was told. "Read this one for school, and keep reading the other one in your spare time."

I didn't get it. Follow two stories at once? How does a person do that?

I didn't, in the end. I drastically reduced the reading I did for fun because I just couldn't get the knack of following two different stories unraveling themselves at the same time across several days. I'd always identified myself as a reader, so when I wasn't anywhere near the top of the list of students participating in the readathon fund raiser, I was horribly embarrassed.

The school year mercifully ended, and I went back to my summer routine, reading voraciously. I was happier, and I realized that the books I had been required to read for school weren't necessarily what I would have chosen for myself. I had discovered that there were books out there that I just didn't like. What a concept.

That idea was driven home in the fifth grade, when the social studies teacher required that we read Johnny Tremain. Horrible stuff. No girls, no fairy godmothers, and no romance arc, set in a time that I didn't understand and couldn't relate to. I hated it and rebelled, reading stuff of my own choosing. JT was the first book I never finished and the first novel I read in parallel to another novel. And a multi-tasking reader was born.

Now I read several books at once -- usually a smattering of nonfiction along with a few novels. The nonfiction is easy to keep straight, but the novels are a different story. To this day, I can't read more than one novel in the same genre at the same time. Two murder mysteries? I lose track of which clue belongs with which killing. Two fantasy novels? I mismatch supernatural powers and heroines. Two romance novels? Who is doing ... well, let's not go there. You get my point. I mix my genres.

I also mix my mediums. I read dead tree editions, both paperback and hardcover, as well as ebooks on my Treo. I also listen to audiobooks on my commutes when I'm not listening to one of a gazillion podcasts that I download on a weekly basis. And now I've discovered podiobooks. Be still my multi-tasking heart. Anyway, I pick up a book in a medium that suits my current situation, and the mediums also help me to keep the plots or information apart.

Do they have readathons for adults? I think I'm ready now.