When reading habits take a hold

I must be over the hill: while Seamus McCauley has the ability to keep track in his head of which page he has reached in his current book. I find I have trouble keeping track of which book it even was.

To be honest: marking-the-right-book is the real purpose of my Kandinsky postcard sticking out from behind the cover, because it never marks the right page (how can it when I have fallen alseep the previous evening, slumped drunk exhausted in my armchair, the book sliding to the floor ?)

With nothing to mark my place, my page-finding strategy, each evening when I resume duty, is to locate where the book naturally falls open (I admit it: I am a creaser and spine breaker) and then turn back a few pages until I find something I can remember and then re-commence from there.

Alas, this strategy is flawed and can prevent me from ever reaching the end of a dullish book - indeed I habitually go backwards as with half a book completed and enthusiasm waning, I turn eight-or-ten pages back hunting for the familiar before re-reading just six-or-seven pages forward and then falling asleep all over again.

I must possess at least a dozen books where I have read chapters 1-7 quite quickly, then most of chapter 8 five times before abandoning the book when re-encountering chapter 7 a second time from the opposite direction.

Perhaps I should get a Kindle.

But I worry that the systematic, ungamable organisation of a Kindle might shame me out of ever abandoning a book again: Do I want waste my life plodding through all those dreadful chapters 9 to 15?