November 29, 2007

BTT: Rolling

From Booking Through Thursday:

Do you get on a roll when you read, so that one book leads to the next, which leads to the next, and so on and so on?

I don’t so much mean something like reading a series from beginning to end, but, say, a string of books that all take place in Paris. Or that have anthropologists as the main character. Or were written in the same year. Something like that… Something that strings them together in your head, and yet, otherwise could be different genres, different authors…


I have been known to do this: I'll pick up one book at the library on a whim, and then proceed to read everything I can get my hands on about the topic. Usually a nonfiction book is what triggers it, then I'll read other nonfiction, fiction, whatever. I've done this with books about Japan, China, the Plague, the 1918 flu, turn-of-the-century New York, King Arthur...and probably a lot more I can't think of right now. Eventually I run out of things to read on the topic, or otherwise get tired of it, and then move on to the next thing.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

My attention span lapses long before I run out of reading material generally, but I do get onto author/genre/topic jags now and then. *grin*

Jane said...

This is me exactly. I don't know what sets off my "research" but hey, the world is an interesting place. It sounds like you have found some great topics to obsess on. Enjoy!

CeeCee said...

I've done that researching something for school. Drove me crazy. Happy BTT!

Literary Feline said...

Nowadays, I tend to do more researching online immediately following reading a book that inspires me to learn more about a particular time period or topic, and while I may add books to my collection for the same purpose, they often don't get read right away. My problem is that I am interested in so many different things at once that it's hard to settle on just one topic.