How reading one book can influence how you read the next: from Kurt Vonnegut to the madness of George III

With my morning reading I switch from reading fiction to non-fiction after about 45 minutes, and I don’t pause. There are only seconds between me finishing the fiction and starting the non-fiction. My wife says that I do everything too fast, and probably most people would pause and reflect after emerging from one spell of concentrated reading before plunging into the next—and rarely I do, particularly after I’ve finished the book. Usually my rapid switch doesn’t cause any discomfort, but this morning was different. It wasn’t really discomfort I felt, but I felt as I read the second book that I was still reading the first. This was odd because the first book was goofy and the second serious. The first book was Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. It’s a book full of absurdities and very funny, causing me to laugh out loud at times. It’s also in its goofy way a very serious book, disturbed even in 1973 that we are destroying the planet. The next book was Roy Porter’s The Greatest…