Eric Wagner's reading regimen

Eric Wagner's other book 

Given yesterday's big news about Eric Wagner's new book, I thought I would share an anecdote about his interest in literature.

I myself have been feeling like a pretty serious reader. I just finished a couple of books, and I am currently re-reading Cosmic Trigger 2 by Robert Anton Wilson, the Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke (about 970 pages, I'm making progress), the Standard Ebooks Short Fiction of Arthur Machen, The Wrong Stuff (a history of the Russian space program) by John Strausbaugh, and the Selected Poems of American poet James Tate. The Tate collection I am currently reading won the Pulitzer Prize.

Eric mentioned in an email that he's reading a bit of poetry, too, and  he also tends to read more than one book at a time:

"I tend to read a lot of books at the same time. About ten or eleven years ago I decided I did not want to read so many poetry books at the same time, so I tried to get down to number of the year. (I don't remember exactly when I started this, but in, say 2013, I tried to get down to thirteen poetry books with bookmarks in them.) Then each year I would start one more poetry book, so in 2014, I had 14 active poetry books. 

"Around 2020 or 2021, I decided to stop adding poetry books. Right now I have 17 active poetry books: Baraka, Baudelaire, Catullus, Chaucer, Collum, Dante, Dickinson, Frost, Homer, Robert Hunter, Pound, Rilke, Rumi, Spenser, and three Zukofsky books: "A", Bottom, and the version of Catullus he did with his wife."

Eric has also mused that it might be fun for a few of us to form a Proust reading group. I'm a little worried he might expect me to learn French first.