 Hello everybody. E here. Today we are going to be talking about a question or a topic that comes up quite often. Any time I mention how much I read, how many books I read at a time, first and foremost I want to get this out there. Reading is not a competition. You read at your own pace. That's the only way you are going to enjoy reading. There is no wrong amount of books to read at one time. There is no right amount of books to read at one time. It's whatever you can do and enjoy yourself. That's how I feel about reading. It's an escape for me. It's my enjoyment time. It's my relaxing time. And if I felt pressured to do any of this, I probably wouldn't do it. So I have a couple things here to help you guys out. If you want to try and read more, it's not really going to help you if you have a limited amount of time. So I need to make you aware that I don't go to work. I do work. I'm an author. I'm a content creator. I do several different jobs from home. But most of the time I am either reading, writing, or spending time with my family. So if you have a 9 to 5 or a 12 to 12 or whatever you work, you are obviously going to have less reading time than I do unless of course you read at work. So I have a lot of time on my hand. Your mileage is definitely going to vary depending on how much time you have to read. So don't take any of this as concrete or the gospel according to E or any of that nonsense. I'm just going to give you a couple of tips on how I do it, on how I read multiple books at a time, and how I read so much because I'm not a fast reader. I'm a very slow reader. It takes me about two minutes on average to read one page of a book unless it's something like a thriller or, you know, most of the stuff that I read nowadays is pretty deep or I don't want to say poignant or important or anything like that. But it takes slow reading to really get the full experience out of the book. So I read rather slowly, but I do read a lot. Number one reason, like I said, is because I have so much time on my hands. Okay, so if you're struggling, first off, I have attention deficit disorder, hyperactivity, all that stuff. So my attention span sucks. That's one of the reasons why I read so many different books at one time because if I was just reading one, I would lose interest super quick. I was going to do a thing where for a month I read like five books at one time, which I'm doing now for the past four, five weeks I've been reading five books at once. But I was going to do, next month I was going to do only one book at a time, but I'm not going to be able to do it. My brain doesn't work like that and I will end up getting bored with it and I'll end up quitting. So that's why I started reading multiple books at a time, way back when I was younger, was because the one book wasn't holding my attention and it wasn't until I realized that there was no race to the finish line. I could finish books whenever I wanted to. If a book took me nine months to read, infinite jest, if a book takes me nine months to read, it takes me nine months to read. That's just how it's going to go. If I have to do, you know, two to four to five pages a day, that's how we're going to do it. So again, this is not a race, it's not a competition. You know, you read at your own pace. But one of the ways I do it is I read multiple genres at one time. Like right now, I have a thriller going. I guess you want to call that Dean Koons' The Servants of Twilight. I have a classic going, Vanity Fair. I have a reread going, which is Stephen King's The Shining. And I'm also reading another reread, which is The Fellowship of the Read. Oh, no. The Fellowship. I said this in another video. The buddy reads called Lord of the Reads, and I keep calling it The Fellowship of the Reads, but it's The Fellowship of the Ring. And with that one, I am all, no, sorry, with Shining, I'm also doing audiobook. With Lord of the Rea, Fellowship of the Ring, I am only reading that one. So I have one reread going as an audiobook, and I have another one going as a physical copy. Now that's how I keep my reading interesting. Usually I have a nonfiction going at the same time. I read about one, one and a half to two nonfiction books a month. And I say one and a half, because sometimes I don't finish it in that month, and it carries over to the next one, but, or I get through one and then halfway through another before the month rolls over, but I don't have one going right now. I will have one next month called The Wild Boy. I'll be reading now, and that'll be my one nonfiction kind of deal. That's another thing is I schedule out my reads. I don't have a TDR necessarily, but if I know I have something that I need to read, I do schedule it. I'll put it in a stack going, okay, this one has to be read next month. And then when the mood strikes me that month, well, if it doesn't strike me, then I just go ahead and pick it up about the last week, depending on how long I think it'll take me to read it. But another thing is, going back to how I'm reading all these at one time, I used to do one of each format also. So I would do one e-book, I would do one physical copy, sometimes I would do a paperback of one book and a hardcover of another just so I could read for it one time. And then I would do an audiobook on top of all that. So the difference in the tactile experience, how you're holding or what you're holding or you're not holding at all, that kind of thing also helps you to keep track of what you are reading. If you're the type of person who can't keep track of things like television shows, if you can only watch one television show at a time, I don't suggest you read multiple books at a time because you're going to have the same problem. But that's why I, the first thing I said was multiple genres and that's so you that you don't get, if you're reading two vampire books together, you're probably going to get confused. But if you're reading one thriller, one literary fiction, one romance or one YA, most YA has romance. But if you're doing that, then it's going to be easier to keep track of than if you're reading three different vampire books. I hope that makes sense. Another thing is schedule your reading times. You're going to read like first thing in the morning and read in the afternoon. You're going to, whatever, you're going to schedule your books for the times during the day that if you're like me, I don't like reading certain content at certain times of the day. Like I'm not going to read a classic in the middle of the day when it's hot outside in the summer in central Alabama and, you know, I don't want to feel stuffy while I'm reading something stuffy. So I will schedule, you know, time when I get up, I knock out the classic and I knock out Lord of the Rings and then later in the day, I will read my thriller or my horror. Another thing is you want to go and the very, the very, I think this is going to be the last point I want to make. I'm going to put my phone down because I've been cheating with notes. You want to do small chunks of books. Again, this is not a competition. This is an erase. You know, read at your own pace. But reading in small chunks helps you first. It helps you digest longer works, especially with books like, let's say, The Goldfinch or Infinite Jest. Both these books I read very, very slowly. Goldfinch over three months, Infinite Jest over nine months. And I appreciated those books. I know I appreciated them much more by reading them slowly than I would have had I read them quickly. So you want to break up your books in chunks unless it is something like a superfluous thriller, like The Servants of Twilight by Dane Coons right now. I read 52 pages of that book yesterday and a whole lot happened. Enough happened that, you know, kept my attention. But there wasn't anything really of import to read. He's not writing deep literature here. It's just a thriller. So I get to have fun for those 52 pages. I just blew right through them. Had a lot of fun. It's a good book so far. Whereas with Vanity Fair, I'm reading literally a chapter a day. And it's going to take the chapters anywhere from 10 to 15 pages long. Some are even as short as five pages long. And the book is 830 some odd pages. So I'm going to be here for a while. But I can't read classic literature like that. I can't read it fast because I have to slow down so that I understand because it's not a Dean Coons novel. So that's how I do it. That's the simplest way I can put all of that. If you have any questions whatsoever, I'd be more than happy to answer them down there in the doobly-doo. So leave all your comments, questions, and let me know what you thought of this video. If you want to see more like this, I don't know what other topics I could talk about. But if you have a topic you want me to discuss, definitely leave it down there also. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another discussion, explanation video. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.