Reading books is awesome! Especially reading more than one simultaneously. For instance, I am currently reading Gardner’s Art Through the Ages alongside The Longman Anthology of World Literature.
It’s just great making connections and this practice facilitates it. After reading a sidebar about the invention of writing in Gardner’s that mentions The Epic of Gilgamesh, I switched gears to Longman. After eagerly locating the passage, I delved in when I made some sort of “Crikey; a connection!” noise of appreciation.
When Puppy, who was doing smart math stuff with real world application, seemed curious about the cause of my little utterance, I excitedly explained my epiphany: The sidebar explained how writing came about out of the need to create records for trade in Mesopotamia. Although the Fertile Crescent was great for growing crops, other resources like metal, stone and wood were more scarce. Then not two paragraphs deep in the Longman Gilgamesh introduction, it describes the first conquest in the epic where BFFs Gilgamesh and Enkidu slay a monster guarding the Cedar Mountain and brings home cedar trees.
Boom! New level of understanding achieved! In an area where lumber was a rare and valued commodity, the king freeing up a source of cedar and bringing it home would have been very exciting. Maybe as exciting as making this connection about the how real world economy of ancient Sumer directly affected the exploits of what both Gardner and Longman call the first true work of literature more than 3,000 years later.
Eh, I may just be a giant nerd for getting so excited about this. 
leners' lens 