Six months of library holds, and what actually got read
Every so often I go through the library account and look at the record of what I asked for versus what I finished, and every time it is mildly humiliating. Here is the last six months.
Placed on hold: fourteen books. Arrived: eleven. Finished: five. Renewed at least twice: four. Returned unopened: three, one of which I had already read in 2019 and did not recognise from the cover.
The pattern is easy to see once it is written down. I put holds on books that a version of me would read: a nine-hundred-page history of a canal, two literary novels that had been on prize lists, something about the mathematics of voting. What I actually finish, when it turns up in a stack of three at once, is whichever one has short chapters. Length is not the variable. Chapter length is.
The canal book is the interesting failure. I got about eighty pages in and enjoyed all eighty. But it arrived the same week as two novels with a shorter loan period, and by the time I came back to it I had lost the thread of which engineer was which, and there is no recovering from that without starting over. I have put it back on hold. It will happen in the winter or not at all.
Two things I am changing. First, one hold at a time for anything over four hundred pages. Second, I am going to stop treating the hold list as a wish list. It is a delivery schedule, and it should contain things I want delivered this month.
Things that did get finished with no friction at all: a reread I owned, a short novel someone lent me in person, and a paperback bought at a train station. The lesson may simply be that a book in the hand beats a book in a queue.