Hello Story Club,
Just home from a really great trip to New Orleans. Spent a lot of time with my family and heard a bunch of great family stories, and we spent a number of hours poring through three (3) big boxes of old photos.
Now I’m way behind on everything, but happily so…
(Join us behind the paywall on Sunday for the first installment of our discussion of Isaac Babel’s classic (and funny) “In the Basement.”)
Q.
Hi George,
Love what you’re doing at Story Club.
I have a question regarding the reading life. How do you choose? These days we are so inundated with dictums — read outside of your experience, read across time, read more books in translation, etc. etc. And these are all good things! But then it quickly becomes overwhelming.
I like to think of my younger self, choosing books based on whims and in-the-moment discoveries. There is so much joy in choosing like that: one intuitive leap at a time. And yet, when you are put in a place of power — curator, editor, critic, teacher — your choices begin to affect others. Do you have any guiding principles for how you choose, for instance, what you assign your MFA students or what you choose for Story Club? And how do you curate your own reading life? Or do you simply read what brings you joy?
Thanks so much, and thanks again for rich experience that is Story Club.
A.
This is, of course, a great question to throw open to the group.
How do you choose what you read? Is there any organization or intention to your reading life? How have your reading habits changed over the course of your life?
For my part, I’ll just say that this question made me realize a few things about my own reading habits:
I don’t read as much as I used to, or, I might say, as “freely” – the days are full of writing and Story Club and teaching.
I’m seldom able to dedicate a couple of hours during the day to reading; most of my reading is done right before bed.
My reading these days tends to fall, mostly, into the “somewhat required” category – finding stories for Story Club, reading and analyzing these, reading student work for Syracuse, reading in service of my own work.
What discretionary reading I do is often a subset of that last category, “reading in service of my own work,” in that I’m trying to find things that excite my ambition or reenergize my love of literature, and especially that puts me into a fresh relationship with language. I do a lot of re-reading of things I’ve already read and loved. I am, you know: reading to be lit up.
I make very little attempt to keep up with what’s current; if I hear about a work some number of times (three?) I’ll add it to my list. Then, often, I lose the list. (I used to be much more committed to what was current.)
I’ll often find myself thinking: Someday I’m going to stop everything and just dedicate a year to reading – history, the classics, obscure memoirs and biographies, science texts – and then I’ll know of whence I speak.
So far, that year has never come. (It really is true that “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”)
I find that, to keep my edge as a reader of prose, I have to work to limit my screen time - otherwise my prose-response gets blurry.
Thoughts? (The above list makes me resolve to do better. Let’s see how that goes.)
I'm team "read whatever gives you joy."
There will never be enough time to read all the things. Read what you love, learn from what you love.
It's great to be curious and go outside your comfort zone, but like, don't force yourself to read stuff you're 'supposed to' just because other people love it or its highly acclaimed or whatever. We don't all have the same taste in things, including the people who give out awards, and that's okay.
Thanks for plucking my question from the slush pile, George. I loved reading all the responses. What I’m hearing from everyone is maybe it’s a good time to lighten up, ha! Obviously, this question was asked from an anxious place. I teach and edit and have too many hobbies, so it all fuels my TBR stack — oh, right, I’m also a fiction writer like many of you, so there’s the “books to fuel the project” pile. I simply have too many piles, and it’s hard to choose, and I get overwhelmed. Then there’s Black history month. And poetry month. And Gordon Lish’s Former Students Month. The Tyranny of Should, as it were—even when the “should” is concocted by my own brain—which I’m told I need to banish.