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How many books do you read at once?

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A friend told me that she’ll only read one book at a time. I used to be the same way, but -- no surprise -- occupational demands have turned me into a many-books-at-once reader. My friend wanted to know if I ever mixed the books up -- if, say, Raskolnikov didn’t end up tussling with Easy Rawlins. Nope! OK, that’s too easy: The settings of ‘Crime and Punishment’ and ‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ are tremendously different. But I really don’t get plots or characters confused. Is it what I’m reading?

Currently, I’m part way through:

‘A Strange Commonplace’ by Gilbert Sorrentino’Against the Day’ by Thomas Pynchon’The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps,’ edited by Otto Penzler’The Boat’ by Nam Le’Cultural Amnesia’ by Clive James’The Development’ by John Barth’The Girl on the Fridge’ by Etgar Keret’How Fiction Works’ by James Wood’The Lazarus Project’ by Aleksandar Hemon

... and a few books I’m reading for work, which I’ll keep to myself, as is the habit of book reviewers. On this list, I don’t see a lot of overlap, but it’s possible that I’d cross the domestic relations of Barth and Sorrentino, or Wood’s and James’ intellectual arguments. But the fact is, I don’t.

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And I think this is because reading is immersive. I’ll look up at the end of a book to find that the clock says 3:30 a.m., or see the day has turned to evening, or realize that I’m starving. That has happened to you, right?

Sure, I also can skim along the surface of a book, to-do lists running through the back of my head, having to re-read paragraphs that didn’t quite sink in.

But when I’m really reading, the experience is like plunging into a swimming hole like a Mexican cenote -- clear and cool and confined to its own deep well. Each book is self-contained (although some cenotes are connected by a deep network of caves, which you could say is true for fiction too). For me, after diving in, each book is a unique experience, with its own filtered light, its own flora and fauna, its own rhythm and movement. I don’t confuse the peregrinations of the Chums of Chance with anything else not only because they exist in their own Pynchonian world, but because the only way to get to them is to stand on the precipice of that world, a different precipice than any other, and jump in.

But it’s possible I’m just romanticizing the practical reality of having to read a bunch of books at once for work. Do you read one book at a time, or more than one? Do you have a maximum? How do you prefer to read?

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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