What do you think has more advantages, reading multiple books at once, or reading one book at a time?
I find it hard to read nonfiction. So, I tend to read a nonfiction book at the same time as a fiction. I tell myself I can read a fiction chapter after I've read another nonfiction one. I try to choose books that complement each other, too. For example, Freedom From Fear and Empress of Mijak, or Mere Christianity and Till We Have Faces.
I tend to read multiple books at a time. Personally, I find that I enjoy particular kinds of books more or less depending on the mood I'm in, so it's useful to have a couple kinds going at once. Right now, for example, I'm reading Hafiz's The Gift (a poetry collection), Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy (an epistemological analysis), Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra (a moral text), and Alice Goffman's On the Run (a first-person sociological study). Some nights I'm in the mood for Hafiz, but other nights I feel like some moral philosophy. It just depends.
I have three or four books going at a time, so I'd have to say multiple. Read one for a few days, trade off to another and then go back to the first book or so on. Currently have A Dance With Dragons, Ender's Game (second time now), and Confessor (Terry Goodkind) going on.
How do you keep up with them all? Better question. Are you enjoying them all equally? For me a book is like stepping into another dimension. I am the characters. I feel like jumping from story to story would lessen that emersion. That's just me though. I wish I could read like that.
Yeah I enjoy them all equally. I never do this with a book if it's my first time reading it though. Yeah I look at it like all the books I own are in their own contained universe, and moving from say ADWD to Ender's Game is like going from... Our dark ages to our future... Make sense? Sounds crazy to type it for all to see like this though.
That's a great way to think about it. Where have I heard that before? Some show or film where they wandered in and out of classic books?
I'm really big on reading fiction books and I'm a movie buff, liking to get lost for 2-3 hours in a good movie, so I have the same type of mentality when reading a book. I'd hate to read multiple books at once because that sense in "getting lost in a good book" would go away for me. I like to be completely consumed by the events in one book, even if I am reading over the span of a couple of days or weeks.