One thing has become very clear to me over the last few days, and that is that reading one book at a time doesn’t work when I’m dealing with a book like Du côté de chez Swann. This is a book I want to read slowly, savouring every word - more like a poem than a novel. It could take me months, possibly years to read it this way. Trying to read just this one book and no other is frustrating because there are loads of other books I want to read and also because it puts pressure on me to read Proust faster than I want to.
So I’m going to change the rules to say that I can read more than one book, but any book that I start I must finish - unless I discover that I really don’t want to read it at all for whatever reasons.
The immediate effect of this rule change is that I have added Tom Holland’s Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic to my current reading list, as well as continuing Napoleon the Great.
I’m hoping this will result in a lot more books getting read - without adding to the pile of half-read books!