Right now I am reading a bunch of books simultaneously in my never-ending attempt to acquire infinite knowledge. Nine books all in a row, to be more precise. Depending on my mood at a given instant, I will jump from the one book to the other. Sometimes smack dab in the middle of a chapter, I will close the book I am currently reading and open up another book. Some reading sessions consist of switching books five or six times an hour. I suffer from an insecure feeling that perhaps I am not increasing my knowledge as productively as I should. That what I am reading at the moment is not valuable enough in the sense that I am suffering an acute shortage by not improving my life sufficiently and quickly enough! This can be very frustrating. The innocent pleasures of reading suffer in that regard which is ironic to say the least. There is this endless source of interesting information out there, and there is absolutely no way I can absorb it all in the limited span of my lifetime. By nature I have an addictive tendency, a proclivity which bends me in fixations. Especially when it is in any way remotely related to the esoteric acquisition of knowledge. So why bother in the first place? Infinite knowledge is preferable, of course. Unfortunately one cannot attain this by reading, even if one could have enough time to read every single book in every possible language that has ever been written in the history of civilization. In order to give my readers a hint of how far along this reading adventure I have come, here is a list of books that currently lie on the reading table next to my bedside. The order is from bottom to top, or since I am by nature symetrical and neat, from the widest (usually the thickest, but now always) in decreasing order:

• Programming Perl, Third Edition by Larry Wall et al.
• Javascript, The Definitive Guide by David Flanagan.
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.
• Essential CSS & DHTML for Web Professionals by Dan Livingston.
• Web Design in a Nutshell by Jennifer Niederst.
• Cascading Style Sheets 2.0 Programmer's Reference by Eric A. Meyer.
• A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar.
• The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.
• Caesar by Colleen McCullough.

Gads, I used to read a lot, but never that much! My style is more Anne Rice. The new movie Queen of the Damned opens today here in So Cal. I have read the whole vampire series, and the Mayfair Witches too (I liked the later more). Don't get a headache!!

Oh can I relate! I always have several books going at once, and it drives me crazy. Like you, I think there's more to be learned from the one I'm *not* reading.

I also seem to have a habit of not finishing books. I'll get down to the last chapter and two and just quit reading. There are only a few books that I can say I've read in its entirety.

Inspired by the film of the same name, the only book by Anne Rice I have ever gotten around to reading was "Interview with a Vampire." I thought it was quite boring. Sorry, but I am just being honest.

Yeah Emerald, there are a couple of books on that list ("The Power of Now" and "Caesar") which I have been stuck on in the last chapters. I know what you mean.

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