November 3, 2009
Tuesday

The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.
                                   — Virginia Woolf, 1882-1941
                                        English writer

I got the thought from Virgina Woolf quoted above from A Book a Week, a blog whose author, Becky Holmes, says “I’ve read a book per week for over 25 years. That’s a lot of books.”

I’ll say. Even taking two weeks or more now and then for some long books, as she recently did for David Ebershoff’s The 19th Wife, that’s more than a thousand books. I don’t know that I’ve read a thousand books in my lifetime. Maybe I have. I wasn’t counting until recently.

I was an early reader and an avid reader. My mother read to me while she nursed my baby sister, and I probably taught myself to read before I started school. That baby sister grew up to become a reading specialist and the author of two guides on using children’s literature to teach children to write. I grew up to explain Emily Dickinson and E. E. Cummings to two generations of lower Dauphin county eleventh graders before reclaiming the writing life I’d abandoned as an undergraduate.

I wasn’t a flashlight-under-the-covers reader. When I was little, my grandmother would put me and my sister to bed and take our eyeglasses with her to her room. She would clean them, and her own, and then put them on her dresser and go to bed. After I knew she was asleep, I would creep in to her room (careful not to step on the creaky spot at the top of the stairs, lest my parents, watching television in the living room, be alerted), retrieve my glasses, and sit on the edge of the bathtub to read by the glow of the night light. I know for certain that I read most of Little Women and Heidi that way. Then I would have to just as surreptitiously replace my glasses and go back to bed.

I know that reading is essential for a writer. I know I read more slowly than most people (about thirty pages an hour) and I think I don’t read enough, not as much as I’d like to and certainly not as much as I should, despite my bringing back armloads of books each year from my literary gallivants in Vermont.

When I drew up The Fiction Fifty, the list of titles I’ve chosen for this year of writing seriously, I figured I could keep the pace set by Becky Holmes and read a book a week. I’m behind, of course. I started my fifth title, Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals, this week, the eleventh week of the project. (I read other stuff too, listed at A Year’s Reading.) Nevertheless, I was feeling pretty good about my progress.

Until I discovered Nina Sankovitch, who is reading a book a day.

Now that’s a lot of books!

*********

The NaBlos of the Past:

2008: Go Susan! — But in recent weeks I’ve wobbled [in my efforts to keep working on my fiction]. There’s been the U.S. election, the challenges of adjusting to the troubles in the economy, a disruption in a relationship I hold dear, and other concerns that have made it difficult to make that fall into fiction, that exiting of the real world and the dwelling in my created world, that is so important to my process.

2007: Perpetual Light — I remembered that we are coming up on the first anniversary of the death of my great good friend, Michael Vergot, who came to me (and to others) in dreams about this time last year. He was saying goodbye, I thought then, and believe it even more so now. I learned of Michael’s death the day after I had walked a landscape that had brought him to mind, although it was not a place we ever shared. But it was the day I now mark as the beginning of my annus mirabilis, this year in my life that has so changed me.

2006: Chug — Victoria Chang was 34 when she won a competition sponsored by Southern Illinois University Press that led to the publication of her first book of poems, Circle. She told Poets & Writers that she spent ten years writing the book and entered more than 30 contests before finding success. She recalled that an editor at a writers’ conference said that “talent, luck, and chug (persistence) are the three traits that can lead to success in publishing.”

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