“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.”
Stephen King, On Writing, A Memoir Of The Craft
I guess this week I am still ruminating on Zoë’s Monday post, which, mixed with the rainy gray weather, has me burrowing into my couch and curling up with books. I’m looking for inspiration, trying to get outside of my head and then look back inside with a fresh perspective. And while my reading lists this semester are long, the book I’ve currently chosen to hole myself up with is A.M. Homes’ In a Country of Mothers.
This is probably my third reading of the novel and every time I reach the end I cannot help but be left with the idea, “So that is how you write a novel. Oh.” The woman can tell a story, and she does it so seamlessly it is both daunting and disarming.
So, I want to know what you guys are reading right now, or what books you return to repeatedly because you feel they embody writing as you desire it to be. I’m already en route to needing yet another bookcase, so give me some ideas with which to overflow the shelves in my future.
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October 29, 2008 at 10:43 am
The question of returning to books and what brings us back again and again made me think of the joy new readers, first-second graders, get from reading series of chapter books – Little House on the Prairie, Boxcar Kids, Nancy Drew. I think it’s the abundance of known aspects – the characters, setting and the structure of the text never change – that leaves them room to make meaning from the new plot line and to ponder the ‘big ideas.’ So it is for me too. These days I turn to Donna Leon’s books set in Venice with the thoughtful Inspettore Guido Brunetti leading me to ponder moral issues that are at the heart of his cases. Comfort reading, like comfort food, has a very important place in this reader’s life.
October 29, 2008 at 11:42 am
As much as I want to immediately reread a fantastic piece upon finishing it, I never really let myself… There’s something more that I gain when I’ve stepped back, let it all ruminate in my head, and come back to it, wanting it even more.
That being said, one of the books to which I forever want to return is Cormac McCarthy’s “All The Pretty Horses.” It was assigned to me a long time ago, which of course made me hate it. However, as soon as I finished it, I had this intense desire to relive every page of it.
While it might be an often quoted line, there is one sentence that forever keeps me coming back: “What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them…” It’s a very stereotypically masculine book; one to which I might typically have a hard time relating. But something about the [seemingly mythic] prose just keeps my jaw dropping and my eyes racing through the pages.
October 29, 2008 at 10:49 pm
I wish I had some thing more original to share. But I don’t. The book I re-read and re-read is Jane Eyre. I first read it in middle school, the cover was pink,with a picture of furniture from a women’s bed room. It seemed so far away and feminine. Then I picked it up again in college and then again later. It transports me every time. Actually, now I know why I am posting this. I am stressed out and I should pick it back up now!
October 30, 2008 at 11:17 am
When I want to write better sentences, I read Joan Didion. I think I’m on number three or four of Play It As It Lays.
When I want to be funny, I read Lorrie Moore.
When I want better dialogue, I read John Patrick Shanley or Adam Rapp.