All of a sudden, in late October [2023], I went from having no books on my docket to five, each of which looked really interesting to me.I figured I’d read a bit of each to decide which to focus on first, then stage the others going forward. They were all so captivating to me, though, each in its own way, I just couldn’t pick one. So I ended up reading them all simultaneously, ten or fifteen pages of one, maybe a chapter of the next and so forth, night after night for a couple of weeks.Very shortly a wonderful thing began to happen: I’d be in the midst of one and would think I was still somehow in the midst of one of the others. Or, occasionally, all of the others! It was as if I was not reading five separate books about widely divergent subjects set in vastly different contexts, but one book with five different facets. I began to wonder how that could possibly be. The essays in this book report three successive iterations of that wonderment, enacting a method (not a theory) of reading anyone can apply to their own reading preferences and rhythms.