Reading Russian Dollies

Does anybody else read several books at once? Like 6? If so, how do you do it? I tend to start one, pick up another, stop the first, read the second, until I pick up a third. It becomes this nested affair, like Russian Dollies, like Calvino’s notoriously wandering If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller. I sometimes dance back up the chain, read another chapter, keep them ticking over, but at the same time pick up more down the line. The line of nested reading that gets longer and longer. I finish one, it’s so exciting! I write out quotes from it and sometime write about it here. Meanwhile, there are brief breakout books – a book bought at an airport which I read in a day, a mystery novel or a light and easy book which is immediate satisfaction, and keeps me feeling ok about the others that decorate my rooms and refuse to be read quickly in an offhand manner. They are all quite patient. They don’t clamour to be finished. They’ve all been read many times before, by people far more exciting than me, they don’t need the reassurance and flattery of another reader, they can be taken or left. They are self-contained and require commitment and perserverence, require decent chunks of quiet time. They can not be gulped down in ad breaks or in a weary half hour before bed, or with half a mind still on work matters or relationship queries – they need a whole mind, a mind up to the task, nimble, well-rested, in top form, and keen.