What's Actually Next to My Bed Right Now

The stack next to my bed right now is a nine hundred page fantasy novel with a cracked spine, a book about complexity theory I’m maybe a third through, and a paperback my wife left there that I keep meaning to start. That’s a pretty accurate snapshot of how I’ve read for as long as I can remember, which is to say without any plan at all.

I don’t do reading challenges. I don’t keep a yearly goal or alternate genres on purpose or any of the systems people build to make sure they’re reading broadly or reading enough. What actually happens is I finish something, or more often get tired of something without finishing it, and whatever’s physically closest to the bed at that moment is what I pick up next. Sometimes that means going straight from a dense book about neuroscience into a doorstop of a space opera with a hundred named characters, no palate cleanser in between, and I used to think that was a bad habit I should fix. I’ve mostly stopped thinking that.

Here’s why it works for me, or at least why I’ve decided it works for me after enough years of it. The nonfiction and the fantasy aren’t actually doing different jobs, they’re doing the same job in different registers. I read the doorstop epics for the exact reason I read the books about how minds or societies work, I want to sit inside a system big enough that I can’t hold the whole thing in my head at once, and watch how the pieces move against each other. Gardens of the Moon took me three tries to get into for that reason, too many moving parts at once, and by the time it clicked I realized the same instinct that made me stick with it is the one that got me through a two hundred page argument about how complexity emerges from simple rules. Different vocabulary, same itch.

The no plan part is the piece I’d actually defend if somebody pushed back on it. I’ve tried the disciplined version, alternate a novel and a nonfiction title, finish what you start before moving on, and it turned reading into a chore with rules attached, which defeats the entire point for me. What’s next to the bed is next to the bed because something about it pulled me in enough recently to leave it there instead of putting it back on the shelf. That’s not nothing, that’s actually a pretty good filter, it’s just not one I could write down as a system if you asked me to.

Some nights it’s forty minutes before I’m too tired to focus, some nights it’s two hours because I hit a chapter I couldn’t put down. No fixed time either, same as no fixed plan. My wife reads a book at a time and finishes it before starting the next one like a normal well adjusted person, and she’s given up trying to understand how I’ve got four things going, all over the place, that I’ll circle back to over the space of a month. I don’t have a great defense of it beyond that it’s gotten me through more books than any system I’ve tried to impose on myself, and at some point you stop arguing with what actually works.