Also, all the time spent in bed over the Christmas holidays meant lots of opportunities for uninterrupted reading. I've finished off five books since Christmas and am reading four more. As I get older I'm finding it easier to zigzag between several books at a time. When I was younger I had a hard time reading several books in tandem, especially if they were all fiction; the narratives had a confusing tendency to blend together in my head. These days I've figured out the secret: read books with disparate themes, and throw at least one nonfiction work into the mix. There's no danger of mixing together the texts of Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran, Jenny Woolf's The Mystery of Lewis Carroll and Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future; even though they're all nonfiction, they're different enough in subject matter (memoir, biography, future predictions) that it's easy to keep all the texts separate in my head. Which is good, because I'm still a little woozy from the NyQuil.
2 comments:
Glad you're on the mend :-)
Interesting thoughts about book shaping. I'd never really considered it, but maybe portrait orientation books are easier to hold? Landscape might be too wide and flop! As an experiment, I tried orientating my Kindle 'sideways' while reading. It feels odd, presumably because I'm so used to 'upright'.
Thinking a bit more about it, I suppose landscape print books also lend themselves better to showcasing images -- where your eyes can look over the entirety of the image, resting on specific spots as desired and not necessarily in a linear fashion -- and that the shorter lines of portrait-printed books are probably easier for the eye to follow in an orderly manner while reading. If a printed line of text gets too long, it becomes difficult for the eye to pick up your proper place each time you "reset" at the next line.
That still doesn't explain the lack of square books, though. Hmm.
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