To Read, To Live

My friend Dan asked me a very interesting question over email last Saturday. Dan lives in Silicon Valley, and I've not met him for more than a decade. He was my colleague during the heady days of the dotcom boom and we've remained in touch over these years mostly via e-mail.

Dan and I both share a passion for reading. We'll often recommend each other books. The question he posed to me was: Do I ever abandon a book half-way? He tries to finish every book he starts, no matter how dull it is.

That got me going immediately on a long exposition on my reading practice. Obviously I've abandoned books halfway before over the years, but I always felt guilty doing it. Hence I've devised a kind of methodology to avoid this. What is my methodology?

I always have a main read. This is a book that I'm committed to finishing no matter what. And while I'm reading this, I also invest some time to evaluate other books that could candidates for my main read. Like a software developer, I fork out from the main branch, to explore new features. This evaluation process could involve reading the introduction and the first chapter of a book. By qualifying them, I recruit new candidates that will be 'merged' into my main reading branch, once I'm done with the current one.

Occasionally, these branch reads could prove to be more interesting than the main one. You simply do not want to put it down. When this happens, you make sure that you finish it within one to two days. And then you return to your main book. These distractions are 'one night stands'. You always return to your main partner. This happened to me recently - my one night stand was Billion Dollar Whale. I received it by courier on Saturday and I finished reading it on Sunday night. And then I returned to the book I was reading at the time: The Upstarts, by Brad Stone.

So far, I've been quite successful in adhering to this process. I've also become reasonably good at sizing up books before reading them. Some books are more suited for audio-listening, some are to be savoured the old-fashioned way--one dead-tree page after another. I'm a big audio listener but I'm not into e-books yet. That might change in the future, as I'm facing storage problems for my books.

Currently I have a lot of books lined up to be my main read. I don't buy as many books as I used to as my backlog of books can already last me a lifetime. There are books that will never get read. But at least, all the books that I've bought, I've had a brief fling with.

Books are like people you meet in your life. Some will become lifelong friends. Some, you'll only brush by briefly. Life is not one or the other. In a blog post I wrote more than a decade ago, I mentioned that people are like books. Every human interaction, every page you leaf through, enriches your life. Read and ye shall live. So read, as the archangel so wisely exhorted.