I’m a huge fan of tandem reading: reading two books at a time, one of which is usually a novel, the other of which is usually a book of stories, essays, poems, fragments or lyric randomness. I find the dialogue between the two books can be quite illuminating. How one chooses which books to pair depends on deliberate and unconscious motivations, external circumstances and inner strife.
Last month, I read The End Of The Affair by Graham Greene while reading Eros: The Bittersweet by Anne Carson. This pairing is admittedly a pretty obvious one: a man wants to explore the ramifications of love, both in fictional and philosophical renderings. That man, tragicomically enough was me.
But while I devoured Greene’s novel in two or three days, Carson’s book-length essay about the Greek conception of Eros and human perception took me almost a month to finish. While I lived our her thesis almost unconsciously in Greene’s novel, I had no need to think critically about the character’s motivations because they were nearly flush with my own.
It was only when I read Greene’s thesis expressed philosophically in Carson’s book that I began to question my own beliefs (as well as Greene’s character’s beliefs). Although she didn’t reference Greene specifically, her varied inquiries into love and desire could just as well have been dissections of his character’s motivations and madnesses.
What Carson did provide, fundamentally, was a definition of desire that all novels can be judged by: “All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.”
(For more reasons to read Carson’s Eros: this awesome appreciation.)
Anyway, tandem reading provides many such textual mirrors and prisms. I highly recommend it.
Currently I am tandem reading Samuel Delany’s Stars In My Pockets Like Grains Of Sand (a bizarre, densely-detailed science fiction novel that predicted the internet, among other things) and Sens-Plastique by the Mauritian author Malcolm de Chazal (a six hundred page book of surrealistic aphorism and observations about colors, nature, sexuality, space and time that can be dipped into at random.)
The upshot of this matching is that my eyes are twitching more than before and I’m seeing hybrid colors in my dreams.
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I recently read The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt and Room by Emma Donoghue at the same time. It definitely felt like the books were in conversation with each other.
I’m currently cross-pollinating with The Undisputed Guide to Pro Basketball (Free Darko), The Broken Shore (Peter Temple), Things I Found Funny (Judd Apatow, ed.), Chronic City (Jonathan Lethem), Mustaine (Dave Mustaine), and An Instance of the Fingerpost (Iain Pears.)
It’s quite an experience, though my nightstand is groaning.
I’ve recently adopted a rotation of three books at a time: a novel that I only read on the treadmill, a collection of some sort that I keep in the bathroom and another book (novel, nonfiction, whatever) that I read everywhere else. My currently rotation includes Ender in Exile by Orson Scott Card, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and The Portable Dorothy Parker. While I’ve yet to find them intertwining, I do find myself imagining what Ms. Parker would have to say about the other works.
I’m a mood reader, so I read multiple books all the time. I’m currently reading “Uncollected Psychobabble” by James Baldwin (edited by Randall Kenan) and “The Savage Detectives” by Roberto Bolano (much like “2666”, I feel like I am living inside someone else’s dream).
Once upon a time, I would read one novel thoroughly before hastening onto the next on the list. The bookshelf might warp and whimper under the straining weight of books yet to be cracked, but I kept an almost devout relationship with that one novel until I could move on. Now this practice no longer sustains my attention. Reading multiple books at a time is like listening to dissimilar music genres (if you believe genres haven’t been entirely displaced by the homogenizing procession of canned pop music) remixed to create a completely new experience of the paired songs.
One of my favourite accidental tandem reads turned out to be a highly illuminating Australian combo: Peter Carey’s ‘Oscar and Lucinda’ and Miles Franklin’s ‘My Brilliant Career’. Two novels, granted, but they sure do work well together.
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