Water, water everywhere...

I have one of my happiest dilemmas this week.

I must admit that as a teenager, even though I read a great deal, I never read The Fountainhead. My parents did have a huge collection of books, but I never once saw a copy of any of Ayn Rand's books. I never really thought about why either. There were thousands of other books to choose from, I read those.

Likewise our libraries (especially the school libraries) never had any of her novels or nonfiction. But they had other books so I didn't miss it.

But I should have. I am currently halfway through The Fountainhead and am in love. I don't want to get into a political discussion over any of it, I just like the book. It's written well, it's intriguing, the story and characters are alive. It's a damn good book and I like it. (Not that I should be surprised that it's good, everyone else for the past decade has thought it was good.) For the past few days I've been on that natural high you get when you're reading a really good book. I look forward to going home and cracking the spine again. I'm praying for rain so I have even more of an excuse to hide under the covers and languish over every word. I'm too busy wondering what will happen next to bother with silly things like food and drink and the fact that it's noon on a Saturday and I've yet to crawl out of bed.

Don't bug me, I'm reading.

And everything would be perfect if it wasn't for the fact that on the very Saturday I chose to hibernate the new Harry Potter came out.

As of Sunday I got my copy. My roommate has already finished reading the book and I have the eerie feeling that everyone else has too...and they are beginning to whisper all the secrets of the Half-Blood Prince. I'm paranoid that I will turn a normally benign corner in my office building and suddenly hear: "And then Ron dies" and my world will effectively collapse around me. (By the by, a good way to get on my bad side would be to tell me what happens in the book before I have finished it. This puts people permanently on my "hate them with a vengeance" list.)

At any given time I usually have at least three, if not more, books going. I have one that I keep in car in case I end up sitting somewhere with a few spare minutes. (Currently that book is Chasing Shakespeares not very good so far.) I have one that lives on my bedside table so I can read a little before bed, or once I wake up in the morning. Actually I have three books on my bedside table: The sleeping-kitty-book, which is a book filled with pictures of kitties sleeping and silly quotes from writers about cats. When I can't sleep it's a good diversion and makes me smile. Joined with that book is my book of prayers (wiccan and my aunt's Christian book). Those are mainstays. Currently joining that is my compilation of the Marquis de Sade.

I also have a book that lives on my computer desk (Henry IV Part Two right now), a living room book (The History of God), and a bag book (Terry Pratchett's The Color of Magic) which live, you guessed it, in my bag.

The Fountainhead is my carry with me book. It goes where I go, lives where I live. I do not leave it except when I got to work because I get a tingly, excited feeling thinking about going home and reading that book. It's like holding off an orgasm for nine hours. Cracking that book open at the end of the day is better than eating chocolate.

In any case, I have no problems reading more than one book at once. I rarely get them confused, and when I do it's kinda fun because it's like getting an extra story. A bonus if you will. However, really good quality books give me a problem.

I don't want to read two desperately good books at once. For various reasons I think that mixing two high caliber books is simply a bad idea.

When you read a really, really good book it's almost sad because you want to read it all right away to find out what happens but you know that once you have finished it you'll no longer have the really really good book to read and you won't be able to capture the "really really good book first reading" feeling again, at least not with that book. So you have to pace yourself in order to sustain that bit of book-joy for as long as you can, but not deny yourself from reading it.

Clearly this a very precise orchestration. You have to get the timing just right or you have either cheated yourself from relishing a good book, or waited so long you loose the flow of the good book. The only time when this balance can be ignored with a good book is if you are going to read it all in one sitting. I read Ender's Game (By Orson Scott Card) in one day...sitting on the sidewalk in front of The Public in New York City. It took me three hours, and was an acceptable amount of time to be overwhelmed by the book - which if you read it - you will be too. Very good book.

When you have two books that require a reading-pause balance at the same time things get far too tricky. Do you read three chapters of the Rand book, wait five hours, then three more? And during the five hours will it be too indulgent to read one chapter of the Harry Potter book? And if you read one chapter there and wait three hours, will you be spacing out enough time to really digest the more complex Fountainhead? What to do, what to do? Furthermore, how will the mixing of the other fluffier books affect the amount of time you can sustain the "I just read part of a great book" glow? The Fountainhead stays with me all day, even through a reading of Chasing Shakespeares, but if I mix it with Harry Potter than I could be overloaded with "good book" glow and it will burn too hot and too quickly.

There is only one acceptable solution to this problem. I have to read one of the books in one sitting. However, the last Harry Potter book took me a day and a half of straight reading because Harry was so grouchy in it that I was grouchy too. If rumors prove correct I may have the same problem this book. Ayn Rand is so complex and dire that it's a little too depressing to read more than a section at a time. I need a Rand-breather once in awhile. Also, on top of emotionally linking myself to fiction, I don't really have the time to sit and read undistracted for a few hours.

So, finish one book then begin the next? Well yes, I could do that. But I'm half-way through the Rand book and I don't want to stop reading that in the middle. Reading the Rowling book is pressing if I want to preserve the "spoiler free" reading experience I prefer. Waiting on either book is not an option.

There is, happily, a third option. Add a third incredibly good book to the mix that I have already read. This would mean I would have continuous reading material of good quality, with sufficient time to ponder on each between one another and sustain the "good book" glow throughout.. It'd be a reading marathon, and I would for the next week and weekend, be emotionally and mentally unavailable to the world around me. But I would be able to read both the Rand book, the Rowling book...and the third...with is a brand-spanking-new copy of The Bell-Jar. (When I was 16 my dog-eared copy mysteriously disappeared from my bedroom and never returned. I know my Mother stole it in order to make sure I would not become depressed - which backfired because the loss of the one book that gave me a sense of identifying joy made me horribly depressed. I fell back on The Virgin Suicides and The World According to Garp but it didn't make me really happy the way Sylvia did. She's a whole different story.)

So I realize that being 23 and married to a nice man and having a home to upkeep; a reading marathon is not a good idea at all. But it remains the only really good solution to my happiest dilemma:

Too many books to read; too little time to read them!