Reading Many Books at Once

Through some trick of brain wiring, I am able to keep track of a lot of things at once. So reading many books at the same time, and not having them bleed into each other in my mind, and being able to pick a book up after a couple weeks away and remember exactly what is going on, are all second nature to me, and I’ve been at it forever. Typically, I have a couple of dozen titles in progress, of all types and genres, all sizes and styles, ebooks and hard copies. Every week, I am finishing books and starting others. There are certain titles that I tend to read at particular places and times – on the bus, over dinner, before sacking out at night.

One result of this approach to reading is that my active “friendship” with a long book can last quite a while as I slowly make my way through it. And I do think of the books as friends, and sometimes I am a little sad at the thought of finally finishing with one – although there will always be new friends to “hang out with.”

Some of my “big reads’ at the moment are Joyce’s Ulysses (almost done), The Canterbury Tales in Middle English, William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (I’m now into the second of the two volumes in the Everyman edition), Karl Marx’s Capital, the Letters of Pliny the Younger (the Loeb edition in two volumes, of which I’m halfway through the first), and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (more than halfway home). Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England takes up five volumes; with the first currently on my iPad, I can see that this project will take years. But that’s OK.  I get very used to these voices – Marx stern and brooking no self-doubt, Macaulay majestically analytical, Tocqueville patient and sensible, Cobbett gruff and at times borderline unpleasant, but then he starts talking about the view of the countryside from his horse, and it’s transfixing.

Cao Xueqin’s classic 18^th Century Chinese novel The Story of the Stone (translated by David Hawkes in five volumes for Penguin) is another multi-year endeavor (I’m well into Volume 2). More Western readers should undertake this journey; it’s incredibly rewarding. Talk about immersion in a world! - in this case, the Manchu aristocracy of Cao’s era. With hundreds of characters to keep tabs on, this is one of the more challenging items in my current portfolio, although it reads like a dream on a chapter-by-chapter level.

One friend I will be sorry to part with soon is Richard J. Bush’s 1871 Siberian travel narrative Reindeer, Dogs, and Snow-Shoes – who could resist that title? – which I discovered through the British Library’s ebooks program. Bush, like so many travel and adventure writers of that time, is a wonderful and companionable describer, and whenever I’m feeling just too hot here in Mexico, I dip into a couple of chapters, and pretty soon I’ve cooled down a bit. Fortunately, I bought access to a whole Arctic library through the British Library’s partner Biblioboards, so even when the Reindeer have moved out of sight, I’ll still be able to use this temperature-regulation-though-reading trick.