I read for more reasons than I can list. To pass the time. For recreation. To take my mind away from a bad place. To educate myself.
One of the most important reasons I read is to experience the frisson that occurs when I discover that someone thinks or feels the same way I do.
I just read this: Some days, I feel like a hummingbird duct-taped to a fence.
Amen! And thank you.
I am looking forward to reading stories from some of my favorite authors. We will be introduced to Krupper and Jons by Kevin Shamel on November 11; Oonah V. Joslin will work her magic November 14 with a Sleight of Hand; Sarah Hillary presents Me and the Mouser on November 17; Jens Rushing's Ars Draconia will launch on November 20; November 25, Sylvia Spuck Wrigley offers Coffee or Tea and Jason Stout's And the Well Runs Deep will round it out on November 27.
I've got one in there, too. I consider Oh, Woman of Easy Virtue a performance piece; you'll see why when you read it on November 21.
You can check out the entire month's lineup at the Every Day Fiction November Table of Contents.
There are a number of books that are on my short list of influential works -- Huckleberry Finn by Twain, Cat's Cradle by Vonnegut, The Caine Mutiny by Wouk, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald, The Old Man and the Sea by Hemingway -- but if I had to pick just one, it would be Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.
It was published in 1961, my freshman year in high school, and the only way I got my hands on it, because there was a fair amount of controversy tied around it, was through a retired librarian named Emma Huber, who first hooked me on reading when I was nine and with whom I had become good friends, despite a difference in age of five decades.
If I was a book junkie, which I was, then Mrs. Huber was my dealer. God bless her, for I am the person I am today, in large part due to her.
The book opened my eyes to the absurdity of life; I grew up in a rural community in Ohio in the 1950s and until Catch-22, I had no idea that the rest of the world was so different from what I knew or that adults were just muddling along, too, trying to figure it all out. And it made me wish that I could write like that.
I have heard the suggestion that you should not read, while you are writing, because your work will become derivative. I don't agree with that; if it were so, I would have to pick one or the other -- reading or writing -- for I am always doing both. And, oh, what a dreadful choice that would be.