Choosing to read

I read books at one of two speeds: days or months.

Part of my problem is that once I start a book I finish it.  It's the same with films and plays.  I have a personal rule that borders on a fetish: when I sit down to something I will see it through to the end.  My reasoning is that once you start prematurely disposing of Art the unfamiliar can be unfairly branded as mediocre and your horizons narrow.  I resent the badly written book that's been sitting on my bedside table since we got back from Greece three weeks ago but I balance that against the Headcount:1 discipline of sticking with difficult tasks.

Like any avid reader I can't put down a book I love but when something bores me I get distracted.   Newspapers, magazines, podcasts, NewsFire and Instapaper all beckon from the periphery.  A symptom of the modern condition that there's always something else to read so unless you develop some sort of discipline your attention will go AWOL: -

Stephan Pastis' Pearls Before Swine

It's hard to disagree with Merlin Mann's analysis that nowadays your attention is a more valuable commodity than your time.  The ticket price of a £25 book is easily dwarfed by the month of frustration of that unfinished book on the bedside table.  When the art is free, as at much of the Edinburgh Fringe, the real cost of consumption is even more obvious. 

Curation is now a vital aspect in any civilised life but sooner or later you've got to make a choice.  An hour spent scanning Twitter to see what others are reading is an hour not reading anything but Twitter.