My Experiment in Simultaneous Reading

I’ve just finished Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch alongside Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America.

I’ve never read two books simultaneously before, but the pairing worked. The Goldfinch proved a genuine page-turner for me—a Dickensian, plot-driven suspense novel layered with thematic, even philosophical, meditations on life’s meaning.

Berry, by contrast, is at his consummate best in The Unsettling of America, distilling a passionate defense of the rural, the sanctity of non-industrial agriculture free of chemicals and heavy machinery. It is, finally, a lament for the erosion of community in our contemporary drift toward urbanization and accumulation. Berry is Thoreau à la mode. Simplicity, he reminds us, yields contentment.

I’m now reading Berry’s Jayber Crow, perhaps the finest introduction to his Port William novels, sixteen in number.

Since my experiment of reading two books at once has proven fruitful, I’m also reading A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer.

Iyer never disappoints in his genius for illuminating the subtle ambiences of disparate cultures. I confess I’m easy prey for this particular read as a longtime devotee of Japanese culture, now under threat. May ikigai, the art of pursuing one’s bliss, never meet its end.

My decision to weave a topical thread through my otherwise eclectic reading marks a meaningful turning in my reading approach. Last year I read twenty books. With ten already read this year, I anticipate—barring life’s interruptions—fifty or even sixty by year’s end.

But numbers surely are incidental. To read this way is to live more than one life, testing long held convictions, enlarging sympathies, and keeping my mind unsettled in the best sense of the word.

—rj