How to Finish a book?

I read a lot books, articles, blogs, everything that i can get my hand (and in good old days shopping bags made out of newspapers) , eyes(which includes people’s shirts) or browser (most notably codeproject.com) on.

However in case of larger books, it was always rare that i will “finish” a book (with the curious exception of novels).

I used to wonder why? I am still not sure but probably i will loose interest due to continuous bombardment of information on a certain subject, may be our brain (my brain at least!) is not capable of handling too much information on a certain subject in one go or it doesn’t like information to be continuously presented in only one style. One thing was for sure, after staying with a book for some days, i will start longing for a switch (to another book). So i will keep switching from one book to another book, without finishing most of them.

One day i somehow bumped into this blog article,

How To Finish Books Once You Start Them

and Wow, i was able to finish a decently big (1000+ pages) book lately following this approach.

Following are the rules of this approach: -

1. Have five active books.
2. Keep them in a pile (not stack, you can follow any order to read one of your active book)
3. After finishing a session with a book, put that book on top of the pile.
4. You can not read any book, but one of these five active books.
5. If you want to read a book, which is not in the pile, either wait until you finish one of them, or take out the book at the bottom of the pile and add a new one.

may be you should try this approach and let me know if it worked for you or not?