The subject’s “advice,” but there’s so much of it floating
around on web sites, at conferences and seminars, and in books and magazine
articles – some from me – that I’m going to take the LadyKillers’ prerogative
and go off topic this week. I started
thinking about last week’s theme, what my fellow bloggers are reading now, and
their answers nudged me to take a look at my own reading habits these days.
As a child, I was a true bookworm, with total access to my
parents’ exceptional library. I read voraciously through college and the early
years of marriage and motherhood. Three or four – or more – books a week was
routine: history, literary fiction, 19th century classic novels, science
journalism, poetry, social commentary, some classic crime fiction. Then there
were magazines like New York and The New Yorker, and Atlantic, Harper’s and Vogue. I was doing freelance magazine
and newspaper writing in those days, so I also read or skimmed others to figure
out what story ideas to pitch.
When I began working a real day job, my serious personal
reading began to slip. Time after work seemed to disappear into household and
family demands, and I was too tired to concentrate late at night. Poetry
slipped away, history next, and I started but didn’t finish several massively
large biographies that weren’t written in spellbinding prose. The New Yorkers piled up, I let some
subscriptions go, and discovered Nero Wolfe and Travis McGee. Does any of this
sound familiar to you from parts of your life?
The LadyKillers’ posts last week made me realize I have lost
some of the breadth of my earlier decades’ reading lists. I did just listen to
a CD course on Chaucer’s work, which reminded me how much I loved his storytelling.
I have E.O. Wilson’s latest treatise on my TBR pile, having heard him speak at
a recent lecture in San Francisco. And, I’m looking at fat biographies of
Benjamin Franklin and Emily Dickenson that have been sitting accusingly in my
bookcase for several years.
I read less, period. Yes, I write fiction and that takes
time. But I also spend far more time online or watching Netflix than I used to.
I don’t like admitting this, and I am herewith pledging to read more, more
often, and more widely. If nothing else, it will tell me if I still have the
capacity for intellectual growth. It also should begin to make a real dent in
the stacks and shelves and cases of books with which I still choose to surround
myself. Unless I continue to do what I did today – buy five new books that threaten to topple the TBR stack next to my bed.
Maybe underneath all the distractions and responsibilities,
once a bookworm, always a bookworm?
