Literary Polygamy

I recently heard an interview on NPR's Talk of the Nation with the author of an article for the Chicago Tribune by cultural critic and book reviewer Julia Keller. Keller recently wrote an article on a subject that was of particular interest to me. Keller's piece examined the whole idea of only reading one book at a time and the stigma that goes along with someone who reads more than one book at a time, yet how that approach might be better or yield a greater and more enriching reading experience. For me, this was an issue that hit very close to home as I am someone who almost always has more than one book going. Now part of that was by virtue of being an English graduate student, so I had my class reading in addition to reading I would be doing for other academic projects and then things I would read for "fun" or outside of the literary world.

I've tried to only read one thing, and I remember really sticking strictly to that pattern for my non-class reading as a sophomore in college. I guess, as I became involved in the English/literary scene, I thought there was a certain seriousness involved with only reading one book at a time and that was the way things went. But even as I read one book at a time, what Keller calls "serial reading," I found myself getting hung up in certain books and eventually needing to read something else to break things up. As I put it, I "cheated" on the book I was reading with another book that I was maybe a little more excited at the moment to read. And like so many things where we make "one time exceptions," my whole system came tumbling down and I began reading multiple books at a time.

And, like so many things, there is a good and bad side to reading multiple books at once. Of course it enables you to learn and discover a much wider range of things. Some books take more time to read than others (and I'm not just talking about page lengths, but certain styles or subject matters tend to be denser and slower reading as opposed to others) and closing off your reading experience limits the things you can discover. But the flip side of this, and what ends up happening to me a lot, is that we don't always finish what we start as we move from one book to another. The list of books I started reading and then "lost track of" as I began to read something else that stole my attention would be a very long one, and it's unfortunate because there would be some great and important books on that very list. But I don't think it has anything to do with how good or bad the given book is, but it is all about how we, as the reader, feel at that moment and this is a point that Keller touches upon in how she organizes her reading. Keller writes:

Life, I maintain, is enriched year-round when lived amid a multiplicity of books, all of which you're reading concurrently. You can juxtapose a melancholy book with a more hopeful one, a great fat shout of a book with a whisper-thin one. You can mitigate an intimidating hunk of literary fiction such as Jonathan Franzen's meaty new novel "Freedom" with a light, palate-clearing sprig of chick lit. You can deliberately set books against each other — the eloquent misogyny of a Philip Roth novel such as "Sabbath's Theater" (1995), say, can find itself stared down by a novel such as Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye" (1989), a story predicated upon the audacious notion that women possess souls as well as bodies.

In that way, books are a lot like songs and albums and sometimes we will listen to a certain kind of music at a certain time of day, but maybe we don't want to listen to that later when our mood is different even if we haven't listened to the entire album. And in that same vein, the book we would read in the afternoon might be different than the one we reading in the evening and that might be different from the book we read before we go to bed. Keller also writes of the synergy that can emerge by reading multiple books at the same time, and I think there's a great deal of truth and potential in that point. Then, if you are learning or discovering something in one text, it might illuminate something you might not have noticed in another. This happens a lot in the English classroom, as students will often bring up books they read in other courses in different classes with different professors. So what makes it wrong to take that approach and move it into the world at large?

I don't think that my way is better than reading one book at a time, nor do I think that serial reading is vastly superior than reading many books at a time. Yes, you might end up not finishing some of the books you start if you are reading multiple books at a time, but if you're forcing yourself to read one thing because it's the only thing you're reading then you might not get everything out of it. It's really about what works best for one's given mentality and how they are wired. As someone who enjoys multi-tasking and who also has many diverse interests, I find myself almost having to read multiple books at a time to satisfy my intellectual curiosity and the breadth of my interests. Now I try to balance things out in some ways. For example, I try not to have too many novels going at once, and I try to balance fiction with non-fiction and even within the non-fiction I like to break that up a little bit (books about current politics, history and sports) and even different genres and styles (novels, short stories, poetry, essays). But even though I understand why exactly I read multiple books at a time and have a rhyme and reason to my approach, it's still reassuring to know that I'm not the only one who thinks about these things.