Image source: Merlina McGovern
Writer after writer (that is published author after published author) espouses the importance of reading as much as you can if you want to be a writer.
I have read my entire life, of course. In fact, for most of my life, I was essentially being paid to read (and still am). Reading to edit is not at all the same as reading for pleasure, though. When you’re reading to improve sentences and catch tiny errors, your reading binoculars zoom into the smallest of imperfections in the bark of a work. You don’t often get to sit back, zoom out, and enjoy the overall shape of the forest of the story.
And, after hours and hours, and days upon days, of reading in such a specific way, I began to lose my taste for reading for pleasure. After getting laid off, I realized that I had gone years reading very few books in my free time. Instead, I would numb my brain by losing myself in the fantasy worlds of World of Warcraft or scrolling mindlessly for hours through social media.
Once I went freelance, though, I found that I could actually enjoy reading again. And, if I wanted to be serious about writing, I knew that I needed to start reading more.
To help with that project, I started a contest in my family. It wasn’t complicated, and it didn’t really start off as a contest. I simply created a Google Doc that included a three-column table. We would each add the books that we read and see how we stacked up against each at the end of the year.
This is the third year that we’ve worked to complete this list. In the first year, I read sixteen books, just a few more than one book a month. I read seventeen books last year. This year I’ve read seven books, and it is only the beginning of April. Ever since I started using books to fall asleep instead of my phone, I’ve been able to increase the number of books I can read drastically.
Again, it’s not really a competition, especially since I feel like I’m cheating a bit by reading page-turners like all those Agatha Christie mysteries. But a book is a book, in my opinion, and all reading is good reading. All reading will help me become a better writer.
Right now, I’m in the middle of reading three books (Radium Girls, a nonfiction book by Kate Moore about the horrific radium poisoning of young women working in the watch dial painting industry in the US and Canada in the 1920s; Pet Sematary, Stephen King’s classic horror novel about family, death, and grief; and The Book of Love, master-short-story-teller Kelly Link’s surreal and long-awaited debut novel), so I will no doubt have several more books to add to my list soon.
How about you? What are you reading, and do you have reading goals for the year? Share them in the comments below.
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