I have a sort of loose collection of books I'm 'in the middle of' or 'planning to read' at any given time. Generally, I'll pick up a book that I've started that I'm in the mood for, but if something I haven't started is more exciting, then I'll start it.
Stuff that's not engaging me stays in the pile, and anything I've started but haven't picked up in a few months migrates back to the shelf. Sometimes this is because it's a bad book & not actually worth reading, but more often, it's because the place I'm at in my life is getting in the way of enjoying it (for instance, it's too dense right now because work stress is eating up all my cycles & I need to stick to something breezy, or it engages with topics that hit too close to home right now & I'm too emotionally drained to deal with it at the moment, or I really need to read a different book first in order to make sense of it).
Ebooks work the same way for me, but I read them under different circumstances. The ebooks I have on my phone get read during breaks at work or during mandatory social events -- situations where I don't have reliable internet or access to my bookshelf but also am liable to be quite bored. The ebooks I have on my computer at home get read when I'm sitting at my computer but would rather read them than twitter or something (which is unusual, but this still happens whenever I do a periodic social media fast, which I have to do every few months for a week or two for the sake of my sanity).
I've always had a pretty good memory for things I read so long as they're nonfiction, and while I can't remember fiction narratives to save my life, I don't think that's the purpose of fiction. (I can recite the first five or six pages of Neuromancer, having read it hundreds of times in high school, but I can barely tell you a plot synopsis because my brain just doesn't work that way: narratives are an alien thing, and they wash out of my memory like rain off a duck's back.) This means that I can generally pick up a nonfiction book after not touching it for five or ten years & have no problem continuing it, but that I have to read fiction in one sitting if the plot matters at all to the enjoyment. (This basically means that I only end up finishing works of fiction that are enjoyable for their stylistic qualities -- novelists who are secretly poets or humorists, like Gibson, Stephenson, Dellio, Eco, or Wilson. I have read a lot of PKD, but it's always a struggle.)
One reason I might remember nonfiction so well is that, by habit, when I read I'm constantly summarizing & rephrasing in my head. This slows me down a lot when I start shouting at the author in my head instead! But, it means that I have at least connected what the author's saying to other things I know & integrated it into some kind of ontology.
Stuff that's not engaging me stays in the pile, and anything I've started but haven't picked up in a few months migrates back to the shelf. Sometimes this is because it's a bad book & not actually worth reading, but more often, it's because the place I'm at in my life is getting in the way of enjoying it (for instance, it's too dense right now because work stress is eating up all my cycles & I need to stick to something breezy, or it engages with topics that hit too close to home right now & I'm too emotionally drained to deal with it at the moment, or I really need to read a different book first in order to make sense of it).
Ebooks work the same way for me, but I read them under different circumstances. The ebooks I have on my phone get read during breaks at work or during mandatory social events -- situations where I don't have reliable internet or access to my bookshelf but also am liable to be quite bored. The ebooks I have on my computer at home get read when I'm sitting at my computer but would rather read them than twitter or something (which is unusual, but this still happens whenever I do a periodic social media fast, which I have to do every few months for a week or two for the sake of my sanity).
I've always had a pretty good memory for things I read so long as they're nonfiction, and while I can't remember fiction narratives to save my life, I don't think that's the purpose of fiction. (I can recite the first five or six pages of Neuromancer, having read it hundreds of times in high school, but I can barely tell you a plot synopsis because my brain just doesn't work that way: narratives are an alien thing, and they wash out of my memory like rain off a duck's back.) This means that I can generally pick up a nonfiction book after not touching it for five or ten years & have no problem continuing it, but that I have to read fiction in one sitting if the plot matters at all to the enjoyment. (This basically means that I only end up finishing works of fiction that are enjoyable for their stylistic qualities -- novelists who are secretly poets or humorists, like Gibson, Stephenson, Dellio, Eco, or Wilson. I have read a lot of PKD, but it's always a struggle.)
One reason I might remember nonfiction so well is that, by habit, when I read I'm constantly summarizing & rephrasing in my head. This slows me down a lot when I start shouting at the author in my head instead! But, it means that I have at least connected what the author's saying to other things I know & integrated it into some kind of ontology.