When my eldest child was ten, he liked to read multiple books at once, arranged in a circle around him on his bed like a giant book buffet. He would pick one up, read a few pages, sometimes even just a paragraph or two, then put it down and move onto another.

As a serial monogamist when it came to books, I was horrified. For me, reading had always been an act of immersion. Surely, he was just skimming along the surface of these books, barely getting his mind wet. I remember asking his teacher if I should encourage him to focus on one book at a time, but she told me not to worry. He was making connections between the books, she said. He was building thousands of tiny bridges in his mind.