There is a particular pleasure in the single-book reader that the promiscuous multi-reader rarely experiences: the pleasure of total immersion, of allowing a world to become so familiar that its characters and landscapes begin to populate your waking hours as insistently as your own memories. The habit of reading several books simultaneously, while defensible and sometimes productive, tends to produce a diffuse relationship with each of them — a reader who knows a little about many places, rather than a great deal about one. There is a case, not often made forcefully enough, for the committed, exclusionary attention of the reader who finishes one thing before beginning the next, and who accepts that some books will genuinely change the texture of ordinary days if you stay in them long enough to let them.