All the reading in the world

Even with two kids under two in the house, there is still a lot of time for some reading. When the youngest will only chill out by lying on an adult, you just have to sit there and not move for hours at a time, and you can only watch so many movies, so it's time to tear through some books.

There's always at least half a dozen long-term reading projects going on, and they're all in various stages of completion. I'm baffled by people who only ever read one book at a time, I've always got a few and switch between them. Life is too short to be reading just one thing.

There's always some big comic thing that I'm getting through, I've just finished off a big re-read of the past 10 years of Love and Rockets comics, and smashed the 50 issues of the Jack of Fables spin-off in a day and a half. I really shouldn't have started the re-read of the past 20 years of 2000ad comics, but there is also no rush for all that, not when there is a small pile of Star Trek Next Generation comics that I got at my last kilo sale that I need to get through first.

I've also been churning through lots of comic books from the library, like the Future State Batman stuff (which had a terrific four-issue story from John Ridley that had a strong and simple set-up that was instantly and fatally undermined by the 1000 other pages of comics that surrounded it) and some Acts of Vengeance cooks and Barry Windsor Smith's Monsters and Death Metal and Tardi's books about his dad's POW experiences in WW2. Some of these books were better than others.

In books without pictures, I recently finished both James Ellroy and Quentin Tarantino's books about how fucked up LA was in the past, and were both fun in their own sick, twisted ways. My long-term goal of reading all of the Doctor Who New Advantures book from the 90s has stalled for a few months, so I gotta crack on with that, but I haven't got a single page into the latest go at Lance Parkin's aHistory in a year, so that's unlikely to

My one-person book club has gone on hiatus, because I just want some comfort reading in the night. I might get a few more pages into that overall history of World War 1, or the book by Nat the bogan cook. Maybe I'll smash through the Ann Dracula books for laffs. It's been a few years.

There's so much to read in the world, so many stories to get stuck into, and I can only read so much at at time, before that short life is over. But I'm trying. Lord, I'm tryin'.