I read books in succession unless I absolutely must read something for class and don't have time to finish the book I'm currently reading. It's the main reason why I've barely reading anything for the last 2 months because I got stuck reading Great Expectations for class and it s absolutely horrible. I had to finish it for an essay, though, so I just read it like a chapter a day because it was dreadfully boring. Charles Dickens is shit, like most of his compatriots in that century, I don't care how many people fawn about him. Simply awful, awful.
I'm very cheap, but the one thing I do spend my money on are books. If it's a book I think I'll like (mostly depending on the author), and I find an edition I like, I'll just buy it. I also tend to buy ones which I'll think will be of use in my (intended) academic career, mostly critical editions (I've bought lke 20 Norton Critical Editions in the past year since they're brilliant, some of them on authors who aren't particularly interesting but who I was going to study or write an essay about, like Wordsworth, Hawthorne, fucking Dickens, etc.).
Otherwise I just take them out of the library, but if I find one I like, I buy it anyway. I'm also trying to figure out how the library's security system works so that I can circumvent it since there are a bunch of great books that absolutely no one has read (I'm talking spanking brand new which have not even been touched). Whenever I'm at the city centre I go to the only 3 bookstores that sell fiction beyond Shifty Brown in English and see if they have anything worthwhile, they generally don't though. It was really painful going to London because there were a lot of great second-hand bookshops and that big bookstore chain had a lot of great stuff, like NCEs and a whole section of just drama.
I prefer 20th century fiction and drama, mostly.