Parallel Reading

I am at present reading five books. I don't suppose I am the only person doing this, nor is it the very first time I have tried it, but it is an interesting experiment.

 

Many years ago when I was teaching senior classes at High School English, I wondered how Victorian people got on when they had to read the best-sellers in this way. Dickens and his contemporaries all published their novels first in the form of serialised magazine instalments of three chapters a week.

 

So you might be reading a novel by Dickens, and a novel by Thackeray, and one by George Eliot at the same time. I tried the experiment then: a Dickens, a Thackeray, and The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot, plus a Hardy and a modern New Zealand one: Strangers and Journeys by Maurice Shadbolt, three chapters each in rotation.

 

Crane

I discovered to my pleasure, and I think also with some surprise, that I had no difficulty keeping the storylines, the characters, and the settings separate in my mind.

 

This time the books are much more different. One of the old ones is Walter Crane's Line and Form from 1900. It shows its age, both in the opinions Crane expresses and in the appearance of the line drawings that illustrate his points. But there is also a lot of good basic material about the techniques of drawing, which as you already know is one of my interests at present.

 

Follett

Even older is Anthony Trollope's Castle Richmond. I do enjoy Trollope; every so often I find a new one and read it. His tone of voice is amusing and amused and the satire is gentle, and no less trenchant for that.

 

Trollope

Ken Follett's Edge of Eternity is set in the Cold War period, and has so far introduced us to Civil Rights marches in the US and Kruschev's regime in Russia, so you can see where it is going.

 

Arthur

Then there is the almost obligatory book, in this ANZAC centenary year, of a book about the First World War: The Road Home by Max Arthur. This is a compilation of extracts from war diaries by ordinary soldiers, nurses and civilians about their lives on Armistice Day and the months after it. The format is exactly the same in each chapter, and the chapters are arranged logically. All the extracts are interesting, but the repetition gets a bit tiresome. Parallel reading is a good idea in this case.

 

Kurtz

The final book this time is Practicing; a musician's return to music, by Glenn Kurtz. Kurtz is a guitarist, but his philosophising and memoirs in this book do not apply only to guitar playing nor even only to music. They are applicable also to all genres of music, even all forms of art, and in fact also to any activity one may be involved in. Really Practicing is about life. Bells ring everywhere as I read Kurtz's struggles with the process of learning, of unlearning earlier habits, of coping with the comments of his tutors, and so on, though I have never played the guitar.

 

So far the experiment is a success. I will try to keep you informed as it goes further.