If you read more than one book at a time, and you change from one to the other, you can feel a little shock. Take this passage from A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit:
Out of the blue, May sent me a long passage by Virginia Woolf she’d copied in round black letters on thick unlined paper. It was about a mother and wife alone at the end of the day: “For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” [p. 15]
And then take this one from Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates:
Our ability to measure and apportion time affords an almost endless source of comfort.
“Synchronize watches at oh six hundred,” says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds a respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jewelled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything’s happening right on time.
“I’m afraid I’m booked solid through the end of the month,” says the executive, voluptuously nestling the phone at his cheek as he thumbs the leaves of his appointment calendar, and his mouth and eyes at that moment betray a sense of deep security. The crisp, plentiful, day-sized pages before him prove that nothing unforeseen, no calamity of chance or fate can overtake him between now and the end of the month. Ruin and pestilence have been held at bay, and death itself will have to wait; he is booked solid. [p. 213]
Solnit gave me a feeling of comfort. It is unhurried and quiet. Yates is loud by comparison. His examples are authorities who establish control. A schedule is tight and disciplined.
I might not have appreciated the feeling of difference if I hadn’t been reading more than one book at a time. This is a little thrill when you are a person like me who finds their thrills more often in books than in stadiums.
Another little thrill is finding a person who explains something just as you have felt it. Cup of Jo linked to an interview with book critic Molly Young.
As a New York Times book critic, Molly Young often reads three to six books at a time. Under that workload, she says, she likes to spend two hours with one book, then change to another. For her, the practice is sort of like moving from a hot steam to a cold bath. “It resets your circulation,” she said. “I like to shock myself between vastly different books.”
Just like Cup of Jo, I like how Young describes how she felt able to become a book critic:
There was a moment, probably in my early 30s, when I realized that I had read enough books that I had not a sense of mastery but a pile of knowledge that I could be a worthy conduit to books. Something clicked. I felt like a humpback whale swimming through the ocean with my mouth full and I was capable enough to filter the nourishing bits of plankton from the rest. I was finally able to discern what I felt was good from what I felt was less good, and could make an argument. And that couldn’t happen until I read as many books as I had read.