September 2025 . . . .

“Rebound Books”

For me it is a given that it’s great fun to read a terrific book. And I find it equally a bummer when you finish a great volume. Oh, not right away, but soon and for some time. I don’t know if there’s a word for this. Something the Bard might have coined, placed in one of the more obscure plays (Coriolanus?) and then to be made famous through repetition by Mark Twain. The definition something like postpartum depression, only not having to do with childbirth.


I assume (because you picked this up or logged into our site) that I’m talking to readers. I don’t understand people who don’t read.


The feeling I personally experience is an idle wish that a book could just keep going on, although I obviously have no idea how that could be, now that the denouement has happened and everything was (hopefully) wrapped up with a metaphorical bow. Still, it is what I wish. And I don’t give up on it — Mr. George RR Martin is that sort of fellow who might take up such a challenge and keep expanding a volume until it cannot be held with folded folios and waxed thread and glue. For the most part, however, I’m stymied. So I rummage around in search of something else. What is in my bedside table pile? (Why don’t I already know what is in that stack? my wife wants to know. You have too many books. I shriek and go into paroxysms of resentment. These are my precious!) What is hiding on the shelves behind my desk, stacked every-which-way so that my wife thinks I need to cull the herd, to which I argue that this is my system, and therefore beyond reproach? Except perhaps consuming French fries, there is nothing like the urge I feel in my core to keep reading. When I’m engaged, really locked in, I can find that I’ve been turning pages like a madman, for hours, days. It’s a very good thing. A habit. And then the story ends. Aargh! So now what? Go outside and take a walk? Are you kidding me? It’s hot!


When we leave someone we like-like (or more likely, in my case, they leave us), we often struggle with what to do next. Yes, this is a weak analogy, but stay with me, because similar questions arise. How can we survive this . . . break-up? How will we get through this coming day? How can we while, suffer, muddle the hours away in some fashion other than intolerably, arduously?


It is my assertion, therefore, that we should never read one book at a time. It is a recipe for such disasters. If our lone source of entertainment is good — very good — it carries such a burden as should never be placed on a story. That personal burden of story-love should always be shared between authors, between genres and styles and plot-structures. Finally, never assume that your book is so . . . titanic that it is unsinkable. The seemingly endless pages of In Search of Lost Time do in fact peter out. (Sorry, Monsieur Henri, that wasn’t nice of me at all.)


That act of sharing the responsibility of absorbing the written word I now give the term “rebound book.” I realize the dad-joke inherent in this title. (I similarly acknowledge the dad-joke in that last sentence.) I have spoken before in these pages about the five books I have cracked open at the same time, and what categories they must fill — New, Education, Dense, Repeat, and Candy. Something I’ve never read before, something with which I intend to expand my knowledge, a tome commonly considered a particularly “difficult read,” something I’ve read before that deserves a second go, and an easy piece — a summer blockbuster with pages. The only variation I include in this list of five is to occasionally include a book I should have read many years ago, perhaps during school (when I was not a good student, not good at all).


Any one of these five open volumes might end up being the next one you can’t put down. Any one could leave you wondering what to do now. And that is why you need to rely on the other four to help you out, and to have a book or two or seven in the wings to step up to the plate. Check out your own TBR stacks. Blow off the dust and get them in the game. Manage your reading like a baseball skipper manages the team, with internal, personal algorithms, and heart. Who’s on second? I don’t know. Third . . . .