For as long as I can remember, I was a monogamous reader. I'd start a book and read it straight through no matter how much time that took. Even if I didn't like it, I was supposed to finish it.
My example was my parents. Not their reading habits, but their marriage, which was often acrimonious, but like the Energizer Bunny, it kept going and going and going.
Or maybe a better model would be a high school production of Mourning Becomes Electra.
College and graduate school didn't change my book monogamy. Even when my reading load was very heavy, I never had a book on the side. That seemed shifty and wrong. Once during my MFA program I had to read Bleak House, The Wings of the Dove and two novels by Iris Murdoch all in one week, but I didn't cheat. I slogged along serially, losing sleep but determined to be faithful. My roommate later claimed I was prone to hysterical laughter that week, but monogamy can make anyone frantic.
Years later, when I was reviewing for a handful of magazines and newspapers and two public radio stations, I still didn't cheat. My motto: One man, one book.
Now I'm a book slut. I can't seem to keep my hands off all the books piled in my study, by my bed, in the den, and sent to me by publishers. I'll try to stay focused but then a new book shows up and I go all Iggy Pop: "You look so good to me...."
This has nothing to do with competition from time spent downloading music, on Facebook or Twitter, texting, or watching the latest Blu-Ray DVD. It's the books that compete with each other. Some months I'm reading as many as five to six books at a time. That means bookmarks, Post-it notes, a pen or pencil, a napkin, a comb, a receipt or whatever else is handy will be poking out from books all around the house.
That also means some weeks I shun the New York Times Book Review. I don't want to hear about another new book in any genre, don't want any book club recommendations, don't want any recommendations from anyone. I don't want to be tempted!
So what's in my book harem right now? John Le Carré's A Small Town in Germany, a biography of "dark and stormy night" Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Bridge Too Far, A Renegade History of the United States, Sarah Waters's Affinity, a book about Nero and The Great Fire of Rome, and probably one or two others I've mislaid.
But I haven't gotten my mail yet today, so I have no idea what new seduction will be lurking in the box.
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I like that interaction I get from reading many things from different perspectives - sometimes an unexpected juxtapostion can arise from reading so many different things at once. If you study Plato and American pragmatist philosophy at the same time, it is unlikely you'll be drawn into Plato's epistemology of the Forms, that depends entirely on visual information, ignoring the other senses. From the pragmatist's point of view, it's pretty obvious that no one ever farted in Plato's Cave.
However, I can recollect only 10-15 books of which I can say that I have established long-term relationships with. This list consists mostly of novels and some poems. I regularly get back to these texts and re-read them. Whenever I do so, I find out something new and astonishing about them - and myself.
listening another book on my computer and reading fourth book on my iPad? Yeah, I know what
you're gonna say. I'm a slut. And I like it that way.
When I was a kid of eleven, i heard that lyric as
"Im always true to you Darlin' in my PASSION..."
works for books too...
and always sang Dorothy Shay's 'say that we're sweethearts again' word for word.
A correct word for word, that is!