I choose what to read differently since I started writing. In my pre-writing days all that mattered was that I be engrossed in the story, and that it made me feel something. Sometimes I was in the mood to feel warm and comfortable, sometimes scared, sometimes thoughtful, and I chose accordingly. Nowadays, there’s another important consideration that goes into the mix: Will this book help my own writing? There are books I feel I really have to read so I know what’s going on in the field, like each year’s Hugo and Nebula nominees. If I’m working on a novel in a particular sub-genre, say a werewolf novel or a steampunk novel, I feel like I should read some of the notable books in that sub-genre. Part of that is so I don’t repeat what’s already been done. That’s a real concern–imagine if you wrote a cyberpunk novel and made your protagonist a pizza delivery guy. Every review of your novel would begin by pointing out that your protagonist had the same vocation as the protagonist in Neal Stephenson’s masterpiece, Snow Crash. Not good. So reading has become part of my job (though certainly a pleasant part of my job).
Of course certain books influenced my writing in another, more fundamental way: they led me to fall passionately in love with books, and to believe that nothing would be more satisfying, more worthwhile, than writing books. Those are the books I’m going to focus on–the ones I re-read, the ones I wished would never end when I was reading them for the first time. Until I turned 17 or so, nearly all of those books were genre. I had no interest in books that didn’t contain at least one elf, dinosaur, alien, or apocalyptic plague. Since then my fiction reading has run about 50-50, genre versus mainstream.
Here are the ones that bowled me over and changed my life:
Genre
Watership Down by Richard Adams. I read Watership Down for the first time when I was thirteen, and I fell deeply, passionately in love with an adult book for the first time. It’s an epic fantasy, structured like many epic fantasies with a journey, a hero, and companions who each have some ability that will prove crucial to the success of their quest. Only, they’re all rabbits. The only weapons they have are their teeth, yet there are heart-pounding battles here.
Pet Semetary by Stephen King. Pet Sematary is the first book that truly terrified me. I read it when I was in college, and I remember putting it down late one night, wanting to read more but too scared to continue. I’ve seen movies that have scared me that badly, but scaring someone with words alone? I think that’s a masterful feat .
Inverted World by Christopher Priest. This novel has such a wonderfully strange premise: A city pulled along by the residents on a track they must constantly entend. If the residents don’t keep the city moving at the correct pace, very strange things happen. It’s sort of like Stephen King’s The Long Walk, only they don’t just have to keep themselves moving, they have to carry their entire city along with them. It was a premise that just blew my mind with its originality, and then the novel itself delivered on the promise of that initial strangeness.
Brittle Innings by Michael Bishop. I think I’ve read most of the baseball-related novels written since the 1950s. There aren’t many. I wish there were more, because I loved Shoeless Joe, The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Natural, The Southpaw. (I loved them so much that I wrote one of my own. It’s the one novel I’ve written–so far–that’s languishing on my hard drive. More on that in my next guest-blog.) Most of all, though, I loved Brittle Innings. It’s a gorgeous book, with rich characters, an evocative setting, a compelling plot with a wonderful surprise, and baseball.
Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre. This one is just so lyrical and beautiful. The imagery has stayed with me for years.
Non-genre
Straight Man, by Richard Russo. Part of the appeal of Straight Man is that it’s about life as a university professor, and that’s been my day job for the past twenty years. What I really love about it, though, is that it’s really, really funny while remaining realistic. It must be damned hard to write a funny novel, especially one that doesn’t stray into outrageousness or parody, because there seem to be so few of them. I’ve loved all of Russo’s novels. Bridge of Sighs was also wonderful, although unlike Straight Man it’s not the least bit funny.
High Fidelity by Nick Hornby. I have to admit, I saw the film first, and hunted down the novel afterward. That’s all right, though, because the film stuck closely to the novel, right down to borrowing dialogue word-for-word, so they’re nearly interchangeable in a sense. I often write about love and romantic relationships. Even when I’m writing about something else, love and relationships seem to work their way into the plot in some fairly central way. Hornby’s novel is a wonderful study on modern love from the male perspective. His character is immature and self-centered, yet likeable despite these vicious flaws, and that character worked his way under my skin in a powerful way. When I set out to write a novel about a young man seeking love while civilization collapsed around him (Soft Apocalypse), I couldn’t help but be aware that in some sense I was propelling a Rob Gordon-esque character into the future, where he would step around corpses while angsting about his love life.
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon. A Pulitzer prize winning novel about comic book artists and writers during the Golden Age of comic books? Oooh, baby. I collected comics as a kid, ran a rare comics business when I was in my teens, so this one had me from the first paragraph.
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman. With apologies to Dan Millman, I didn’t find this a well-written book. It’s clunky; in places plot and dialogue are wincingly hokey. For me, though, that didn’t matter, because the book has such heart. Millman writes with such passionate conviction about the path of the warrior-sage, and the quest for spiritual enlightenment, that the subtitle of the novel–A Book that Changes Lives–isn’t as hyperbolic as it sounds, or at least it wasn’t for me when I read it in my twenties. In my novel Soft Apocalypse, one of characters happens upon a book about living the life of the warrior-sage, and though I changed the title, this was the book I had in mind.
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. Or anything by Kurt Vonnegut, really. The man knew how to make reading fun. He tossed around fascinating, irreverent, quirky ideas and characters in a manner that couldn’t help but have an impact on how you thought about the world. Once, when I was nineteen, I stood in line to hear Vonnegut speak. I got there early so I would get a good seat, then discovered that I was in the ticket-holders line, and was supposed to purchase my ticket before getting in that line. The tickets were sold out. I’m still devastated.
If I had space, I’d add something by Pat Conroy, and Tom Wolfe to this list. Lord Valentine’s Castle should be on my genre list, and Hyperion.
As a writer, one of the perils of reading others’ novels is the risk of becoming frozen by envy and despair, because you feel as if you’ll never be capable of writing so brilliantly. When this happens to me, I try to step back and remind myself that it’s not a competition. There’s room for lots of books on the shelves, and how cool to have one of mine up on the same shelves as these, maybe pressing up against something by Vonda McIntyre.
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They say the key to success and happiness is to do what you truly love — whatever that is and they’re right, but love is tricky as we all know. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell the difference between infatuation and love. (There’s always a catch, isn’t there?) So it is that it will come as no surprise to most of you (hopefully) that writers read. Seems fairly obvious when you think about it. Artists enjoy looking at art so much that they pretty much live in it 24/7. Musicians are the same. I promise Jim Hensen loved every little thing about puppetry — even the things that made him just a bit crazy or frustrated. Writers, real writers, are the same way about writing. We love good writing* with every fiber of our being. So, again I say, writers are readers. If you’re wondering if you’re a writer, I’ll give you a hint. If you read, if you have a book or a poem or a short story crammed in your pocket/handbag most of the time, if you talk about stories at least a couple of times a day, if you glory in the feel of paper bound in book form and are thrilled with the texture of the cover, if you’ve ever given up lunch in order to buy a book or an eBook, if you’re interested in everything about publishing, even the bits that make you want to scream, you’ve got the heart of a writer. If you don’t, you just don’t.
