I find it hard when there’s a long list but nothing explicitly in the queue. I’m half-reading a few books, including my continual crawl through the Treasury of Yiddish Stores, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (which is super long and super dense and to be real I only read it at work), and a falling-apart copy of Buber’s I and Thou from the library. Oh, and I’m trying to get through the Bible, which I’ve never actually read cover-to-cover (whoops). So in a sense, I’m reading lots of things, but in another sense, I’m very “between” things.
Perhaps the feeling is one of whiplash, not unlike what I experienced transitioning from The Brothers Ashkenazi (a long novel, which I started immediately after another long novel) to Later the Same Day (a short story collection, with a wildly different aesthetic) – it’s less the works themselves, but more the reader.
Being between a few short story collection and then a number of books I want to read concurrently (one fiction, one history, one that I’m calling “Jewish-German Philosophical Zen”, and one, well, we’ll say “religious”), without focus, is perhaps the problem.
Regardless, there’s just so much to read. Always so much to read.