One of the biggest reasons I read multiple books at once is so each one can speak to each other.

Take these passages from three books I’ve been reading:

From Murakami’s Norweigian Wood:

“Even so, my memory has grown increasingly dim, and I have already forgotten any number of things. Writing from memory like this, I often feel a pang of dread. What if I’ve forgotten the most important thing? What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud?

Be that as it may, it’s all I have to work with. Clutching these faded, fading, imperfect memories to my breast, I go on writing this book with all the desperate intensity of a starving man sucking on bones. This is the only way I know to keep my promise to Naoko.”

Now from Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us:

“Imagine all the people you meet in your life. There are so many. They come in like waves, trickling in and out with the tide. Some waves are much bigger and make more of an impact than others. Sometimes the waves bring with them things from deep in the bottom of the sea and they leave those things tossed onto the shore. Imprints against the grains of sand that prove the waves had once been there, long after the tide recedes.”

And here’s James Clear’s Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones:

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so does the evidence of your new identity. This is one reason why meaningful change does not require radical change. Small habits can make a meaningful difference by providing evidence of a new identity. And if a change is meaningful, it is actually big. That’s the paradox of making small improvements.”

Here were three different genres of books, and three different takes on the theme of memory. To Murakami, memory is a precious but fleeting resource – something that must be preserved, for the memory of someone affirms their existence. To Colleen Hoover, memory is something that is dependent on other people, for we all contain imprints of others, and some touch us a little more, a little deeper, than the rest. And to James Clear, memory is something fundamental to self-improvement: the small habits we maintain produce evidence for a new identity, shifting us towards the person we want to become. Each one provides a different perspective on this topic, each with its own nugget of wisdom.

Through reading different books simultaneously, you create conversations between different authors that would never occur when reading one alone. Different concepts and imagery bounce off each other to form a wonderful mix of colour and themes that cannot be experienced any other way.

As a general rule, I always have at least one fiction and one non-fiction book going at the same time, and occasionally a third for light reading. The concoction of ideas that come as a result is fantastic.