There’s a lot of buzz about the new Amazon Kindle.
Yes, it’s cool, but I’m not overwhelmed conceptually because I’ve been reading novels, plays, stories, you name it, in my Palm Pilot for years. I get sneers and raised eyebrows from certain quarters, but folks–I could care less where the words are posted, in a rare collector’s edition or in my Palm: as long as I can read it comfortably, the story is doing its job.
Newsweek’s cover story this past week leads with Amazon.com’s genius founder Jeff Bezos and the amazing Kindle, but mostly it’s about reading itself–the future of it, the demise or transformation (take your pick) of reading as a pastime in the New Millenium.
It’s not news that reading has been falling off for years. I prefer to see it as a realignment, a "market adjustment" to pressure from competing entertainment sources. I can live with that. What disturbs me, however, is a trend I began to observe in the classroom: fiction writers who don’t read fiction.
In my experience, if you’re a writer, non-writers will assume there’s something amiss if you haven’t read everything. But writing takes time and intense concentration on subject for days, months, even years. That’s a lot of time and energy that can’t be spent with your nose in a book.
So how well-read should a writer be? No less than Norman Mailer said he was always disappointing young writers who assumed he would have read their work.
You can’t read everything, he observed, and still get your wrk done.
What about you? Are you a voracious reader? Do you read fast or slow? Would you rather write than read? Let’s have a poll….
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
It is interesting that Bill raised this subject. At last weeks (Nov. 16-18) North Carolina Writers Conference, Amy Kurtz and Ryan Edel and I were discussing this very subject. We are often taken aback when a writer says boldly, “Oh, I don’t read.” We wonder just how a writer can not also be a reader. How does one learn the skill or art of nuance? How does one learn to describe their surroundings or human emotion, unless they read?
We decided it is impossible, especially after reading what the said “non-reader” wrote.
I have to admit, since I started reading, I read differently. I see poor writing, feel it, and it hurts. I also feel and appreciate the skilled and beautiful way an author can turn a phrase.
As a writer, I find I thirst more for writing. I read at night and I listen to books while driving around in the car ( I’m currently listening to Widow of the South by Robert Hicks and I’m reading Lost in A Good Book by Jasper Fford — Amy is cheering!)
However, I think I am coming around to agree with the YA author, Louise Hawes, who stated that she can not read the same type of work she is currently working on, she feels it gets too muddled.
And as a writer and reader who currently has a home library of more than 3,000 books…I am an eternal optimist that reading in whatever form (downloaded to a palm pilot, iPod, Kindle, CD, or old-fashioned bound hardcover) reading will endure.
I love this topic. One of my favorite things to do is listen to what a person is into and suggest a book to read. I even have a top 10 favorite books of all time. I love, love, love to read. I re-read things fairly often. I listen to books on CD in the car on a fairly short commute (15-20 minutes) and then pop out the CD and listen to it when I am cooking dinner. I am currently re-listening to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which is so great on CD. You can hear the horror in the reader’s voice. I also have a stack of books by my bed and a whole stack waiting to be read in the living room. Not to sound ass-kissy (can I say that??) but I just started Stark Raving Elvis last night. Got through 2 chapters in only a few minutes. Very entertaining and readable.
Anyway, I agree with Ann – I read books differently now as a writer. Take Dracula for instance. I loved it the first time because of the great story, but the second time I can truly appreciate how difficult a task the author had. It is a book written in correspondence – letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, etc. So, the author tells the story in first person from 6 or 8 voices/characters. Men, women, different ages. It is really a remarkable book, from both a reader’s and a writer’s perspective.
I do believe that a writer needs to be a reader. It is important to know what is out there, just as a doctor or lawyer keeps up with trade journals.
I do not remember being this charged up about reading when I was in HS or college. I often wonder what could be done to keep people engaged, even what I could do. If the Kindle gets new people to read, I’m all for it.
One last thing – read anything by Jasper Fforde. And, read The Stolen Child by Keith Donahue.
I can’t help myself!!
I don’t think I would be able to write now if I hadn’t spent half my childhood with my nose in a book. I’m actually on an interesting quest right now, trying to become better read. I have a second-hand textbook with stories from the classic authors I never had time to read as an English major, and I go to the university library at night to read from literary magazines. I started this as “research” – I wanted to figure out what makes for a good short story and learn which magazines are publishing the kinds of stories I write. It’s strange, alternating Hawthorne and Faulkner with more modern fiction – I’m not sure yet what I’m learning. But reading fiction and writing fiction increases my appreciation for both. Many of the kinds of stories that I couldn’t stand reading for class I understand now only because I can see what goes into the writing, and I can plunge deeper in my own writing after seeing where other writers are going.
Unfortunately, I’m not quite sure how to separate my current writing ambitions from genuine appreciation of good writing. Honestly, I have to say that the one thing most helped me appreciate reading was taking workshops in college. Reading and critiquing the stories of my friends taught me how to read critically, but to this day it sets me on edge when I read published stories that don’t work for me. Kind of a mixed blessing – it takes some of the fun out of reading when you catch yourself analyzing style and syntax in a paperback you picked up for “fun.”
In my reading, I mix more contemporary fiction with the classics all the time. For me, it helps me keep relatively current as well as filling in what I consider to be gaps in my own “literary education.”
When reading, or more accurately, thinking offline about the story that I am reading, I mentally pull apart the construct of the story itself. It gives me little epiphanies when I discover something the writer did in a rather subtle manner. For instance: “oh, I get it! The lawyer had to die because he could possibly have shed light on the whole mystery! His death kept the cast in the dark longer. How clever!”