Like all aspiring new authors, I read/skim/eyeball/inhale all the new books so I know what's going on in our incredible world. But I'll confess right now, I don’t read as much as I should. First of all, I’m lazy. Secondly, I like to think that I’m too busy writing.
I read the opening and closing of novels to study plot technique and style. Among the authors I guarantee a reading from beginning to end are Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Elmore Leonard. But every once in a while I'll go on a reading kick to breathe some fresh air into my system.
McEwan’s style is not show-offy like many writers today. It tends to be spare, the way I try to write. Saturday is one of the best novels ever written.I just finished reading Solar and was taken by the aging down-on-his-luck Nobel scientist still trying to save the world.
I’m not Victorian in my reading tastes but I gravitate to older writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Salinger. I’ve practically memorized Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby. Like I said about McEwan, their styles are simple and no-nonsense and their stories move smartly. When you put them down you know what you have read.
Every once in a while a book will come along and knock me for a loop--usually with the mood it creates. Books like Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," Mark Helprin's "Winter's Tale," Kate Walbert's strange little love story "The Gardens of Kyoto," and a rare find in "Islandia," the only novel by a long since forgotten attorney from Philadelphia, Austin Tappan Wright.
I read newspapers. I love newspapers. Maybe it’s because I was raised on them, before television news came along and dominated our thinking. (As a kid growing up I would race down the stairs, grab the Cleveland Plain Dealer off the front porch and read it from page one to the comics in the back.)
This morning I read The New York Times and The Philadelphia Inquirer on-line and for twenty minutes tried not to spill my coffee and granola on my copy of the Los Angeles Times.
I have books from the library right now by Tom Rackman, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Martin Amis. I’ll glance through them, pick up a nugget or two, but I won’t read them. (Though I can change my mind, as I did with Rackman's book, The Imperfectionists, which I wound up devouring.
Having finished this cranky little Blog, I guess I'm reading a lot more than I thought. Good thing. We authors need all the readers we can get.
