Anyone who bothers looking way down at the bottom right of this blog will see the title of the book I'm currently reading. If you check it out now, you'll find an anomaly: I'm reading three books at once!
I never do this. I never can understand people who do. How can you move among books? Unless they're all equally uninvolving, in which case why are you reading them at all? I want to be engrossed in any book I'm reading and if I'm engrossed, why would I switch from the engrossing book to another?
Well, now I find myself more or less engrossed in three at once.
First, I'm reading Chang-Rae Lee's new novel The Surrendered. I've read and liked all three of Lee's previous books. Here his writing is heart-grippingly beautiful. Most likely I'll have more to say about it when I finish it.
That's what I'm now thinking of as my regular or normal book. The one I read on the subway to and from work. Usually it would also be the one I read during my lunch hour. But that position, on at least some days, is now held by, of all unlikely titles, Rabbit, Run by John Updike. I am anything but an Updike fan. But a good friend of mine asked me to read so we could talk about it, and I agreed. So I'm moving through it on the occasional lunch hour, essential misogyny, casual racism, homophobia and all.
Finally, at home in the evenings when I'm not working on something else or bombarding my enfeebled brain with TV, I'm reading the graphic book Footnotes in Gaza by Joe Sacco. As I reported earlier, last weekend I read his earlier book Palestine. It's very good, and very intense, so intense that I decided to take a breather rather than plunge right into Footnotes in Gaza, which is when I started Chang-Rae Lee's book. However. I can't get Gaza out of my mind, of course I can't, and Footnotes kept staring at me from its perch on my desk at home, so last night I stopped resisting and started reading it. Thus book #3, my evening reading material currently.
So okay, if some similar confluence accounts for the several-books-at-once reading others report, now I get it. For me this is a unique moment in my reading life. Once this trio loosens its grip on me, I trust I'll revert to my usual one-book-at-a-time existence.
