When it comes to reading, I can never get enough. I used to have a very single track mind with books, I would start one and then nothing else till I finished what I was reading. But as time went on and I began to branch out into the world of audiobooks, I found that I could handle more storylines at the same time. Unfortunately for me as I talked about in a previous post, there is a potential danger of reading too much at any given time. As I said in that post, I was just juggling way too many books, both the pleasure books and the one I was writing. Well as I kept increasing the number of storylines, my mind started to crack, and I ended up taking an extended sabbatical from reading altogether. When I finally got back into the swing of things I realized that if I weren’t careful, I would repeat the same mistake again. So I knew I needed a way to moderate my intake of literature. Armed with this knowledge, I looked at the amount that I had read in the past and decided to switch it up a bit.
Since I had no intention of limiting either my writing or the work on my blog I needed to limit the pleasure reading that I did. So I took a little while to think about it, and I realized that I had the perfect way to separate my literature, headspaces. What is a headspace? Well, people might have their own definition of what a headspace is, to me a headspace is where or how I consume a work of literature. I’ve come to find out that when it comes to reading I have enough room inside my tiny mind for three significant headspaces, and I can sometimes squeeze in a fourth.
The first of my headspace is dedicated to either reading a single story that is either on my kindle or in some form of the printed medium at a time. This area is where I had the most trouble all those fateful years ago, as I was trying to leverage different kindles using each different screen as a separate headspace. This arbitrary limit forces quite a backlog of books that I want to read but since there is a limited number of books that are on my list that that are available on either my Kindle or print, but instead of fighting that limit I use it to curate the books that are in that list.
While I have a limited amount of time to read books, I get much more traction out of my second literature headspace since it is dedicated to audiobooks, specifically Audible. This queue moves reasonably swiftly as I have more time to listen to books than I do actually reading them, but thanks to audible there are plenty of options for me to delve into.
My third headspace for consuming literature is another audiobook, but I only use this headspace when I’m listening to a book with my daughter. It is a habit we picked up a long time ago. We’ve gone through a numerous amount of books together ever since we started this little tradition, and while I’m the one who gets the most of this headspace it is something we do together, and that simple act is fantastic.
Now, these headspaces form the bulk of my reading, but I do have one more to consume beautiful stories. My fourth headspace is dedicated to graphic novels. Now I’m not talking about comics like Farside or the ones in newspapers, those are easy on the mind and are utterly fleeting. No, I’m talking about graphic novels like those of Farscape, the Dresden files or Angel after the fall to name a few. These novels, or more accurately depending on the edition a collection of comic books, have beautiful storylines, and every so often I absolutely pull one of these off my digital shelf and read the story held within those pages.
With these clearly defined headspaces I am comfortably able to read the stories I want while still being able to maintain my mental health.