Lately, when I’m reading a really good book, I have either of these compulsions:
1) To take said book and throw it across the room out of sheer jealousy.
2) To put it down after a particularly well crafted paragraph, or phrase, or chapter and sit with it, contemplating its construction and meaning.
I must admit, though: I usually tend to do the former.
Well okay, I don’t throw it. Most often I drop it by my bedside with a satisfying and definitive ‘plonk’. Sometimes I don’t even pick it up again. How’s that for poor form? Cutting off my pleasure to spite an author I might never meet. The only loss is mine.
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I remember once in one of the dozens of “How to Write” books I’ve read this sentence: “A good writer can fit in one simile a page. An extraordinary writer can fit in two.” He/she (I’ve lost the reference) of course meant a good simile. I reflected on that little rubric for a while and doggone if he/she wasn’t right. I don’t think I had read anything which could fit in two similes a page without seeming completely amateurish or contrived.
Then I picked up D.B.C Pierre’s Vernon God Little* and I’ll be dammed there they were, like little neon lights across the page.
What did I do? Stop reading. Why? See Point One again.
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It’s a tricky game, ‘tis writing. On the one hand it’s the one thing I want most passionately, most ardently, to be connected with; not in a ‘fame’ sense, but in a professionally legitimate sense. I still feel like I’m working it out. I haven’t stopped wondering if I’m a gigantic interloper. When people ask me at parties, “What are you working on? When’s the next book coming out? WHEN?” I get tongue-tied. So I answer (truthfully) “I’m currently writing short stories because I don’t have enough time to devote to the novels I have tucked away.” And they nod politely and say good luck with it, and I think, I’m going to need it.
Because if I can’t read at the moment, how on earth can I write? They are inextricably linked, in my opinion; one feeds the imagination, the other gives back, and out, into an audience of just yourself or millions, it doesn’t matter, it sustains you.
So even just having the books at my bedside, my forgiving friends, they get me through these low months. And it’s just as well, because not much else is. Hopefully, I will regain my reading mojo and I will be like Adam again, who reads every night up almost until midnight.
Hopefully.
*Winner of the 2003 Booker prize.
