Somehow the books I enjoy the most are usually the ones that make me inspire me to immediately google other books, and then - if I'm being good - make a list of those titles to read later. If I'm not being good - which is most of the time - I'll pick up that book immediately and read a bit of the contents. Whether I keep reading or put the book down and go back to what I was trying to finish totally depends on how interested I get in the second book. If it's an ebook that's available for free (I so dearly love Project Gutenberg) the odds are pretty high that I'm going to have to read a bit immediately. I think that's probably due to me being of the generation that once I had to trudge to the library (through the howling wind and snow! etc!) to hunt down a book or article (or order it on interlibrary loan, or hunt for info on microfiche, etc., etc.) - and the fact that I can start reading a book the instant I find it continues to make me giddy. Seriously. I feel like I should have one shoulder lower than the other from the books I toted to and from the library in college and then grad school.

Er, anyway, so I have this habit of starting one book, then that leading to a second book, and then another - and suddenly I'll have multiple books that I'm trying to read all at once. Sometimes this goes very, very badly. Sometimes I manage to work it out - trying to tell each book diplomatically that while I can't focus my attention on it constantly, I will definitely have some quality time with it - eventually.

Which leads me to the current read....one of the current reads:

  Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen, by Katie Whitaker (2002)

If you've not heard of Margaret Cavendish here's her wikipedia page - spoiler, she was amazing. Here's a quote from the wiki:

"Her writing addressed a number of topics, including gender, power, manners, scientific method, and philosophy. Her utopian romance, The Blazing World, is one of the earliest examples of science fiction. She is singular in having published extensively in natural philosophy and early modern science."

There's more at the link, and the page is long because she is indeed that interesting. Also it has a nice healthy list of sources, which is (I think) where I found this particular book.

I've wanted this biography for years now, and only just gave up on it ever appearing in ebook form thanks to a friend's giftcard - so now I have it in hardback. And I can tell I'm going to enjoy it because I hadn't made it through 20 pages before I already had another book to look up. And yes, I'm about to quote a large chunk, but I feel I have to because there's the story of a teen who adores books - or at least people she's only met in them - in it.