I have, as usual, started to read multiple books. January 2010 currently looks like a bumper month. Mind, I don’t appear to be reading anything off of my intended reading list for last year.

There’s “Ahistory” by Lance Parkin, which attempts to make some sense of the timeline of the Doctor Who universe. Also Who-related, I’m reading “The Face of the Enemy” by David McIntee, a Doctor Who novel without the Doctor, featuring instead those excellent chaps from UNIT and the Delgado Master.

Aside from Who, there’s the time hopping play “Arcadia” by Tom Stoppard, the various booklets of the new Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying game, and also “The Night Watch“, the first of the vampire triology by Sergei Lukyanenko.

Quite why I need to book hop so much, I’m uncertain. I’m not sure whether it detracts from my reading experience or somehow heightens it. Possibly, if left with only one book to read I would grow bored too quickly. On the other hand, perhaps I dilute the experience by trying to digest so diverse a set of materials.

Whatever the impact, I remain frustrated by my own inability to read at greater pace. I feel like a runner aiming for a goal, and yet I constantly fall short despite my best efforts. I try to speed read by take in only the first sentence of each paragraph and at best glancing at the rest, but almost certainly this has it’s own downside that I don’t actually read evrything. I could so easily miss something using that method that it only seems worthwhile where I read casually and the material involved is just a set of game rules.