I’m always reading a dozen books at once, sometimes twice that many. Even my “current novel,” literally my bedtime reading as I drift off to dreamland, is divided between Tao Lin’s sad but oddly beautiful Richard Yates and Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, the latter of which I’m reading as an e-book, a PDF version of the Project Gutenberg edition on an old Palm Pilot that’s not much good for anything else these days. In part, this reading style is because I have an aversion to the immersive experience that is possible with literature. Sometimes, especially if I’m “away” on vacation, I’ll plop down in a deck chair on a porch somewhere with a big stack of books of poetry, ten or twelve at a time, reading maybe up to ten pages in a book, then moving it to a growing stack on the far side of the chair until I’ve gone through the entire pile. Then I start over in the other direction. I can keep myself entertained like this for hours. That is pretty close to my idea of the perfect vacation.

I’ve had this style of reading now for some 50 years – it’s not something I’m too likely to change – but I’ve long realized that this is profoundly not what some people want from their literature, and it’s the polar opposite of the experience of “getting lost” in a summer novel, say. Having been raised, as I was, by a grandmother who had long psychotic episodes makes one wary of the notion of “getting lost” in the fantasy life of another.