Booking Through Thursday: Contemplation

So … you’ve just finished reading a book. For the sake of the discussion, we’ll say it was everything a book should be—engaging, entertaining, interesting, thought-provoking. The kind you want to gush over. The question is—do you immediately move on to your next book? Or do you take time to contemplate this writerly masterpiece and all its associated thoughts/emotions/ideas for a while first?

After I read an amazing, perfect book, I decisively close the back cover and then sit back in my chair for a few moments, savoring it.

And then I immediately move onto my next book. With the kind of schedule I have, I don’t really have time to let a book percolate on its own for a few days. However, because of my genre rule (I can’t read the same genre twice in a row), my reads are usually so different that my last read is percolating on the old subconscious back-burner even as I’m digging into something new. On the Nerdist, Chris Hardwick recently interviewed musician Paul Williams, who discussed how sometimes the best way to remember something is to think about something else; your subconscious is still pattern-forming, even as you’re doing something else. And that’s how I feel about it; even if I’m reading something else, I’m still contemplating what came before.

Of course, this is in the case of the kind of book that blows your hair back, which has been few and far between for me this year…