Monday, June 20, 2022

Pick a Book, Any Book

 Q: Do you read only crime fiction? If so, why? If not, what else do you read? Does it affect your writing? 

- from Susan

 

Much as I enjoy it, a solid diet of crime fiction would become boring or worse. I’m three-dimensional: a mother, citizen, art lover, environment protector, vacationer, cook… Not sure how I could get along without the challenge, provocations, revelations, calls to action, and invitations to try my hand at recipes and new (to me) foods. I’m a voracious reader, have been all my life. 

 

Does what I read outside the genre I write in affect my writing? Good writers show me how to do it better, I hope. Writers on other topics expand not just my vocabulary, but my perspective on the world and my characters’ places in it. Not overtly – I haven’t succumbed to writing polemics into the middle of a murder mystery – but to understand and perhaps be a little sympathetic to their biases and unrealistic dreams and short-term failures. I recently found a character of mine saying something that made me laugh and roll my eyes, but was telling about her fairly self-focused view of her adopted country. Not planned by me, but definitely coming from some place in my brain that had absorbed an opinion, or a critique of an opinion, something I read. Who knows what…Reading is powerful, subversive, and invaluable.

 

Some books I read recently:

 

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, David Sedaris

BEWILDERMENT, Richard Powers

DEACON KING KONG, James McBride

GREAT PLAINS, Ian Frazier

DIARY OF A PROVINCIAL LADY, E. M. Delafield

HOUSE MADE OF DAWN, N. Scott Momaday

ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE, Anthony Doerr

I ALONE CAN FIX IT, Carol Leonnig, Philip Rucker

INCOGNITO, David Eagleman

 

Quite a mix, isn’t it? Who knows what havoc it’s playing with my writing?!

4 comments:

Dietrich Kalteis said...

Thanks for the list, Susan. I'll check them out.

Susan C Shea said...

Because of your own wonderful prose, I think you'd like DEACON KING KONG. Momaday is a Native American writer/post and HOUSE MADE OF DAWN won a Pulitzer in the 1960s. It's a dense story and telling, but his descriptions of the reservation landscape from the perspective of an Indian are quite beautiful.

Dietrich Kalteis said...

I've put stars next to those two titles. Thanks again, Susan.

Josh Stallings said...

“ Writers on other topics expand not just my vocabulary, but my perspective on the world and my characters’ places in it.” preach it!
Wonderful post. And I agree full heartedly about what we read sinking into our deep brain and rewriting some of our code.