I’ll admit that I generally prefer reading a physical copy of a book or magazine or newspaper rather than reading an ebook or reading online, but I’d gotten the book I’ve been reading lately—Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne—through the Libby app, courtesy of the Fairfax Public Library and of Amazon, which delivered the ebook temporarily to my Kindle. I finished the book Saturday night late and particularly enjoyed it, though at the time I finished it, I thought I still had nearly 20% of the book left to go, based on the line that measures how far I’ve progressed through my reading.
“I’ve still got so much left!” I thought. “How is Montaigne already dying? What is Bakewell going to write about for the rest of this? And why is the ‘chapter’ break for the next section so very very far away?”
I’d forgotten that the book would have a chronology and notes and likely a bibliography and….
Done before I’d expected to be, I realized that I wasn’t sure what to read next. The new issues of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine have stories calling to me, and I’ve got a stack of books on my TBR pile waiting to read and then my New Year’s Resolution about a novella a month and….
No lack of possibilities—and never sure why the choice sometime seems tinged by anxiety… as if I might make the wrong choice?
Is this something others struggle with?
Stay tuned to see what I end up picking next….