Read any good books lately?

The idea for this new sub-blog dawned on me as I was falling asleep last night. I'd been reading the lovely Ursula Le Guin - her 2006 novel Voices - and was thinking about a post that I wanted to write on it, only to realise that, for people who are judging my reading by what is featured in the "Northside Reading" segment of my blog, there may be some confusion over what exactly I am reading right now.

Let me explain. I've always had a bit of a short attention span in reading books. I love reading, but don't always have the patience to focus exclusively on one book until I've finished it. I think this failing began to accentuate when I was completing my Honours year at University, and has probably only worsened since beginning full-time work. I read the books that I'm teaching, and then I have about twenty-five other books on the side that I dip in and out of. The result? Well, when I come to feature a book in "Northside Reading", I essentially have to choose which one of the many books I want to profess to be reading - and, well, when you put it like that, it sounds a tad insincere, as if I could say, "I'm reading Ulysses," when I haven't picked it up for months and am actually engrossed in Tom Clancy at the time. Which wouldn't ever be the case, because I hate Tom Clancy, but you get the idea.

So here was what I thought I could do. I could create a new blog devoted to what I'm reading at the time - anything that I'm reading, whether trendy, glamorous, intellectual, popular or mindless. It could be a place for honesty about my reading, instead of trying to pick one book to feature and then write some trite sentence-long comment that's supposed to sum up how I feel about it.

It might also encourage me to read more, and maybe finish some of those books that I've had on my shelf for months or, in some cases, years, only half-read. (Or maybe I'll just be wasting so much time blogging that I won't have time to read. Sounds a bit like people who spend so long on FaceBook that they don't have time for their friends.) Anyway, we'll see how it goes.