I believe the time has come to create some sort of organizational system for the books I plan on reading. Just because switching between five books at a time  has started to have the rather surreal effect of overlapping them all together in my head.

A typical scenario: Nabokov is watching Sisyphus push his rock up the mountain and shouting comments about literature  to Bill Bryson, who is hiking past with his pack on his back and who isn't looking where he is going (because Nabokov is shouting at him and he finds this alarming) so he runs headfirst into Leopold Bloom, who promptly starts rambling, and they both of them fall backwards into Sisyphus, who curses and loses control of his rock, which rolls down the hill and squashes Nabokov dead. Then French rebels, with the help of the Blue Beetle, build a barricade in objection to all this nonsense. Out of Sisyphus' rock and the One Ring and some Ice9 and a large quantity of rubber duckies and stuffed badgers.

The duckies and badgers have nothing to do with what I've been reading; they just wanted to be part of the barricade, and the French rebels figured well,  why not?

Entertaining as these sorts of scenes are, it is no way to go about reading.

The issue is, my interests keep expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and the people I've met who actually read keep cocking their heads at me adorably and recommending things that sound fascinating, and I've more than one professor who is in the regular habit of handing me things and suggesting I read them in a way that effectively renders the optional reading essential.

There are too many good things to read in the world.

I think I'll have to limit the number of books I'm reading to three at a time; one for intellectual work (Les Mis, Ulysses, etc etc), one for situations where I can't focus on anything hefty but still need something to read, and one book whose purpose is pure, unadulterated brain candy.

More later. Or maybe not; this is a very boring post, isn't it?