The Grasshopper Reading Mind
How many books should you read at a time? I must confess that I’m one of those people who leave multiple books open at a time, returning to them in random sequence. I could be Alice Vincent in this epistolary (that is to say email) exchange courtesy of Penguin UK.
I often find myself reading a book in print and listening to a different book in audio at the same time. Add an e-book to this, then a picture book, and maybe a middle grade novel and sometimes that means five titles zipping around in my brain. Mass chaos? Or am I falling “into different worlds without losing your way?” Does it work that way or is dividing your attention the same as losing it?
A couple of months ago, I read The Trees by Percival Everett. This is a bitter, dark, sardonic tale of revenge murders in Money, Mississippi and the long reach of an iconic crime America knows all too well. It’s poetic, cryptic, satirical. It rings with ironic relevance to its own present moment as well as to the throughline of American history. Chapter 103 made me laugh out loud, written as it is the voice of a former (well, refusing-to-be-past) president. I read it in small increments at first, and by the time I got to the middle I was reading big chunks of it whenever I could. It’s brutal and scathing—and then it sideswipes you with humor. The NPR reviewer called it “hard to put down and impossible to forget.”
At the same time, I listened to The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride. I loved the many stories of its Jewish, Italian, Latino and Black characters, their lives winding in and out of each other’s with joy or caution or knowing, and always with an awareness of how power and prejudice target each community. Carrying misunderstanding between neighbours, and bearing, as well, consequences far into the future, echoing out of the past. I’m in awe at how the characters build and become real. This isn’t plot, it’s bigger than its events. It’s about community. Rhyming and repeating, the story raises up its smallest characters, imbuing them somehow with power and agency when it’s so painfully lacking in their lives—young Dodo, Moshe, Nate, Shona, will live forever in my mind. Even Doc Roberts, an abomination of a man, has his own story, its petty wants and longings made plausible by society’s terrible assumptions about class and color. I’m so glad that the audio book format allowed me to slip this into my multi-book juggling.
I read an e-book, The Skull by Jon Klassen, a macabre little work that manages to make a skull—a skull!—not just plausible but downright appealing. I think I’d like to see this in paper, to hold it and to turn its dark and shiny pages.
I read the e-galley of a picture book, When I Visited Grandma by Saumiya Balasubramaniam, illustrated by Kavita Ramchandran, of which more soon. This travel and family tale will share a book release date with my own Look! Look! in a couple of months. Look at that kid sipping coconut water. That’s one of Kavita’s interior spot images.
Finally, I revisited two of the sparkliest little early readers you could ever want to hop and skip your way through, with or without a child to keep you company: Ready? Set. Rides! and Ready? Set. Birthday! by longtime friend and fellow autodidact Vaunda Micheaux Nelson. Vaunda’s Raymond and Roxy series began twenty years ago with a friendship and family story, Ready? Set. Raymond that I was lucky enough to see in manuscript form in a few revisions before it became a book.
You might conclude that mine is a grasshopper mind, flitting restlessly from book to book to book. And maybe it is.
Maybe you are a seriously serial reader and that is all right with me.
In my childhood I was encouraged to read one book at a time. I never felt satisfied with that arrangement. Took me years to give myself permission to half-read several at once instead; to close the ones that didn’t speak to me; to return to some of them later and see if I’d grown into them. I love all these various ways I can read now, juggling several titles at once.
The editors at Penguin UK invite us to join their conversation: How many books do you have on the go at once? Let us know by emailing editor@penguinrandomhouse.co.uk.
