I always seem to be in a number of stories at once. I always have a book, sometimes two, that I am actively reading on my e-book reader. Sometimes I will be working through an actual paper book, too — though the humidity here makes paper books prone to mold. In addition, HA and I usually have a book that we are reading to each other, which makes a book last many weeks. I should note, here, that these are all fiction. Right now, we’re watching some Ken Burns documentaries, though the two-hour episodes are more television than we usually have time for in a day, so they get broken up into episode fractions. Between these, I’m usually mentally working on a column for this site. Right now I’m working on a feature for a print publication. I’m almost always working on a longer story in my head. I’m generally listening to an audiobook for those times that my hands and eyes are tied up but my brain is free.I have a single podcast where Wil Wheaton reads a short story each week, and I will usually preempt my audiobook for that.
To keep up with the nonfiction world, I follow a few interesting accounts on Mastodon. I have an RSS feed for a number of authors, journalists, and organization that I like to keep up with, and those feeds publish everything from clever one-liners to novella-length deeper dives. So much reading. So many stories. And yet…
Sometimes days, or even weeks, go by where I don’t get to one or more of the stories. If someone were to ask me “what audiobook are you currently listening too” it wouldn’t be that unusual for me to not be able to remember the name or, if I have the name, be unable to recall what’s going on in the story. Yet when I pick up a story again, within a line or two I’m usually re-oriented to the story and feel up-to-date with the action.
It puzzles me a bit why we should have evolved this ability to pause stories and then resume them as if no interruption had occurred. It doesn’t seem as though it would provide the kind of fitness benefit that would have driven its development prior to the time that we had written stories. Yet without it, our story landscape would look very different. I’m glad that I can jump from story to story without having to spend a lot of time recovering the context.
I do admit that every once in a while stories I’m reading will overlap in odd ways. Recently, two stories flashed back to pre-WWII Chicago and they rather mixed in my brain in interesting ways, particularly as one was billed as history and the other was alternate-universe SciFi.
—2p