Reading and Writing...and Reading... and, well, Writing...

May 16, 2008

I have been consciously trying to change my reading habits. I've been a lifelong reader--voracious, compulsive, obsessive--of fiction. I've never been very good at reading book length nonfiction, although I regularly read magazines like Smithsonian and Time. And recently MacWorld, and for years I got Writers Digest, for a while Publisher's Weekly. And USA Today. And now that I'm online all day I tend to read five or six general news articles each day that appear on my browser homepage, which is MSN.com.

As I got more obsessed with getting my fiction published--which was typically mysteries or thrillers--my reading became narrower. And eventually, with a few exceptions like Stephen King, I found myself reading mysteries and thrillers almost exclusively.

I've been trying to branch out a bit. Partly because I think it's healthy. Partly because I'm getting stale on mystery and thriller fiction. Even writers that I love, like John Sandford and Jonathan Kellerman and Robert B. Parker, aren't satisfying me like they used to. Maybe it's just too much "been there done that," or perhaps it's just me growing, or maybe it's me being aware of the authors' tricks and tics and themes and obsessions.

So I've been reading more science fiction, more young adult and middle school books, and more nonfiction. The book I'm holding in the photo I just finished the other day, HOUSE OF RAIN by Craig Childs. Partly about the Anasazi, it's also about Craig Childs wandering around the southwest, visiting Anasazi sites and trying to track the Anasazi as they migrated, essentially from the Colorado plateau to northern Mexico, over about a three hundred year period. It's beautifully written, fascinating, and rather dense and long. It took me a while to read it, taking breaks from time to time to read other things, which actually may be the beauty of reading nonfiction books. Novels tend to require a certain active participation on the part of the reader, but nonfiction books can often be ingested in sections over time.

I'm aware, though, that my conscious change in reading material is also not entirely conscious. It's also emotional and professional, a reflection of a growing frustration with the publishing industry and my place in it. I may be, in some ways, looking for a new home for my book writing passions, testing out different genres and types of books to see which ones might work better for me.

Or not, because this is a psychological subject as deep as the Marianas Trench. My reading influences my writing. My writing, also, influences my reading. I have often gone in search of books similar to the novels I'm currently working on--first person PIs if I'm writing first person novels; kids books if I'm writing one of those; multiple POV thrillers if that's what I'm working on; comic capers if I'm trying my hand at one of those. I've also interviewed a number of bestselling authors and occasionally asked, "What are you reading these days?" and the number of times they have said, "I don't read too much fiction. I mostly read nonfiction," or in some cases, they're very up-to-date on who's doing what in their genre but they keep nonfiction of some sort going at the same time, suggests there's something else going on there. Perhaps the nonfiction feeds their own fiction more than other fiction does.

Which makes me wonder, if after all these years of avoiding book length nonfiction, I'm thinking more about writing book length nonfiction, or, if in fact, I'm just trying to find the right book length nonfiction for me, topics and writers that can hold me the way a good novel can. Not all nonfiction books work well for me. But I do like reading about politics, the gossip-ier the better. HOUSE OF RAIN has opened me up to the possibility that travel narratives, especially if they're infused with a historical or cultural tension, can be wonderful reading.

So my questions are these?

Does your reading change over time? 

Does it reflect your writing life?

Does it reflect your life?

Does your life reflect what you're reading?

Do you have emotional phases in your reading, where you want to just throw every book aside and say, "To hell with this crap."?

What are you reading now?

Cheers,

Mark Terry