One of the books I'm currently reading is "Zarathor's Bane" by Andre Norton. It is part of the Witch World series, which I have been slowly reading over the last year or so. Alas, I don't particularly like the series. The books are old and have an archaic style of prose. Also they are fantasy and I'm not a big fan of the fantasy genre.

So why am I reading the 20 or so books that I have of the series? We have to go a little back and ask: why do I read *any* book? There are four basic categories of reading materials of mine. One is computers and programming, which I read because I like the subject and it's my field, so I need to keep up to date and learn new stuff constantly.

Currently I'm reading "An Introduction to Database Systems", which is a textbook that I got from Shannon. It was used in the database class at UC Berkeley, one of two Computer Science classes that I didn't take. It's about time I've read the book since I've been working at a database company for a year and a half now.

The second category is military-type books. This falls into two sub-categories: strategy and unit histories. I like reading books on military strategy, specifically operational strategy (i.e. theater strategy). I also like to read unit histories, although those usually focus on a particular war a unit was in. So I've read several civil war unit histories and some world war 2.

The third category of books is anything relating to GURPS, which is a role-playing game published by Steve Jackson Games out of Texas. GURPS has a lot of sourcebooks based on licensed worlds. So I've been reading the novels that the sourcebooks are based on. This is why I've Wild Cards, Uplift, Cthorr, and several other excellent series. Witch World and Conan are two series that I am or am going to read that I won't relish reading. But I feel that I must read them just because that's the rule.

A sub-category of the third category are books and sourcebooks based on other RPGs that tie into GURPS. The tie-in must be some published article or book. So for BattleTech, which had a short BattleTech to GURPS conversion article in Roleplayer, I read the BattleTech sourcebooks and novels. And I'm also currently reading the Wolf's Dragoons supplement.

The fourth category is anything else. Currently this includes the many Star Trek novels written every year. This one is going a bit slower since it is a lower priority than the other two. But I do love Star Trek so I created this category so I could read the novels.

One thing I do is read two to four different books at the same time, switching among them to keep everything fresh and keep my mind attentive. This usually boils down to something work related, something related to my BattleTech campaign, and something for fun. I tend to set as my goal anywhere from 20 to 50 pages to read from each book each day. Usually I don't read that much unless it's a slow work day.

I do read a lot of books, averaging about one a week. There is so much out there to read that it can be frustrating at times, as I have a stack of 100 books to read still. But it's fun and it's my primary way of getting more knowledge. It's something that I think everyone should do at least a little.