if on a winter's night a traveller...

I started reading this book last week.  It is by Italo Calvino, an Italian author, and it is translated into English.  Basically, it might be one of the weirdest, most intriguing novels I've read. The novel narrates a reader who is trying to finish a novel, but runs into numerous obstacles to completing a single book.  The insanity begins with the mistake of a publishing company and each time the reader believes he has discovered the rest of the book he is reading, he runs into another book.  And each book captures his attention just as much as the one before him, if not more.  Calvino has opened a dialouge about reading and how we read, why we read, and what happens to us when we read a book and when we don't complete a book. 
It's got me thinking about how life seems to interrupt the books we are reading.  We start something, we head out on one journey, and then, by no effort of our own, we reach a deadend.  And we try, with all our might, to pick up where we left off and soon enough, we figure out that we have started a completely new manuscript. 
So have I been trying to read a single story for the past twenty years of my life, or am I satisfied with each new novel that comes my way, accepting the cliffhangers that will never be resolved and the helplessness that accompanies being only a reader.
But what does it mean to be only a reader?