Having a multi-column view to quickly scroll through feeds was something I loved in the Sage extension for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sage/). It was sorely lacking in Google Reader until I found a user style for it (http://userstyles.org/styles/21444/google-reader-multicolumn-expanded-view). Having at least two, but ideally as many columns as defined by user preference, as an option in Old Reader would make quickly skimming large feeds a lot easier.