I Read Less When I Write
Perhaps that is wrong
There’s a pile of about twelve books stacked on a very narrow and tall plant stand. The topmost book has a fine layer of dust covering it. Sometimes I dust that pile and think “Next time I have vacation I’ll finally read The Master and His Emissary by
…” and then a year passes.
Scattered around the house, on shelves and side tables, are other small stacks of books. Waiting. There’s Look Homeward, Angel — of which I have read around 100 pages so far. Those 100 pages already felt like a whole book, and this is meant in a positive way. It’s beautiful writing, and I must finish the book.
I’ve worked my way through most of Mere Christianity — a thin book and somehow I have not managed to finish it in one sitting. It requires thinking and reflection. Sometimes books let you know when it’s time to read them. Like The Count of Monte Cristo, which my husband recommended to me many years before I finally read it and considered it the best book I have ever read (perhaps.)
Years ago I went on a René Girard spree and fought my way through Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Came out of that philosophical thicket looking at the world quite differently, and was happy when
published his more digestible Wanting. I then proceeded to gift this book to all my friends and family. Read it.
I was gifted this book here above. It is The Order of Time and it was one of those groovy! woah dude! books that open your brain and shake things around. I recently gifted it forward to someone else after a conversation about the concept of time.
Fairy tales are complex. I understood that for the first time when I read Andrew Lang’s fairy tale collections as a young teen. I’ve been thinking a lot about these denser tales lately, and feel a calling to read them again.
Kazuo Ishiguro always make me turn my head, so I did read Klara and the Sun over a few days when it came out. It was the first time I, as a reader, found myself spotting a few problems in famous writer’s writing. Small details and logical problems that left me wondering if Ishiguro had rushed toward the ending. Ishiguro always writes on the same wavelength and spectrum in which I exist as a reader, and it almost felt like noticing my own mistakes (of which there are many.)
As a Blurry Creatures listener (unless it is a super scary episode) I of course had to pick up a copy of The Book of Enoch. Wild and strange stories that are way better than movies. Stumbled through the book in a couple of days.
Any time I discuss books I have to mention Jack Vance and the Dying Earth series. Jack Vance was perhaps the best modern wordsmith of his era and beyond. It is a true pleasure to read his stories. The details, the humor, the horror, the otherwordly feelings, the surprises are unlike any other writer that I have ever encountered. I wrote Meet Your Maker in imitation (honor) of Jack Vance.
I find that I read less when I am most focused on writing. I need my thoughts to emanate from my own inner world when I write. Perhaps that is wrong. Perhaps I should be reading more.
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"The Count of Monte Cristo" is one of the best books I've read, Minna.
By all means finish reading "Look Homeward, Angel." It is perhaps the most beautifully written and told story I have ever read. It doesn't get really good until you're coming up on the end, hence the title. "O, lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again," the theme. And, yes, Maxwell Perkins, Wolfe's Scribner's editor, felt like he'd read a novel even near the beginning. Thomas Wolfe was pretty much banned from his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, once the book was published (you may already know this), because the residents recognized themselves in the novel even though Wolfe used fictional names. But, he made me love Asheville (Altamont in the novel). It is one of my centering places. I have visited the town and Wolfe's childhood home there, stood in the bedroom where Ben, his brother, died, and read the novel twice. Once you have finished reading that, start on his next novel, "Of Time and the River." I have wound down the mountain from Asheville on a train three times and across Virginia at night. The passages Wolfe wrote are so touching, so poetically beautiful. But, that's as far as I've gotten. There's something so lyrical and stirring about a Southern male's writing. There's nothing like it. I'll finish the journey of that novel someday, before it collects too much dust in my library. I'll stop here; otherwise, this'll look like a novel.