I can’t tell you whether I prefer Ian McEwan’s recent novel Saturday to his prior effort, Atonement. I can’t comment on whether John Banville’s The Sea deserved the Booker Prize (though I can tell you that his older work The Book of Evidence was certainly Bookerworthy). I don’t know if The Plot Against America continues Philip Roth’s unprecedented streak of literary home runs that began with 1997’s American Pastoral.
Why? Because I haven’t read any of these books.
The truth is that ever since I got serious about writing, my desire to read has taken a serious nosedive. I used to run through novels at the rate of two or three a week — but since late 2000 I’m lucky if I can get through two a month.
You used to see me carting a novel and a dictionary with me just about anywhere I went. Not to denigrate the pleasures of pulp fiction, but the kind of stuff that I used to indulge in was heavyweight material in both tone and physical bulk. Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Richard Powers, Philip Roth, Paul Auster, John Steinbeck, Franz Kafka. At the end of every year, I could consult the critics’ best-of picks and have an intelligent opinion about most of them.
Compare that with my current reading habits. I picked up Alfred Bester’s classic The Demolished Man (winner of the first Hugo Award) almost a month ago. Not to denigrate the talents of Mr. Bester, but this book is a one- or two-nighter. Yet I can’t seem to finish the fucker. I’ll pick it up, read a chapter or two, then put it down for a week or more. I’ve had the same stack of books sitting on my side table for half a year now, untouched: China Miéville’s Iron Council, L. Frank Baum’s Patchwork Girl of Oz, Robert Wright’s Nonzero, J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. I finally gave up on Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell because, well, I found the whole thing meandering and pointless.
What happened? I wish I knew.
Does writing scratch the same itch that reading does? I’m starting to think so. After all, when you write a word down, you’re reading it too — in many cases three, four or five times. In some ways, it’s a much richer experience. As a writer you become intimately involved with those words, you chew them over and examine them from angles that you might gloss over in someone else’s work.
What you lose by concentrating on your own words, of course, is a sense of interaction with the outside world. You get caught in an echo chamber. Eventually your own work will suffocate.
Any other writers out there who have experienced this phenomenon? Anyone with good suggestions?