On my desk, propped between two Buddha-head bookends, are my most essential books. Virginia Woolf's A Writer's Diary, and Thomas Merton's Thoughts In Solitude are always in this small grouping. For several years, I kept Ian McEwan's Saturday and Alice Munro's Runaway close by as well, because they were two contemporary works that, when I read them back-to-back, unlocked the mystery of close third person narration. Right now, in a pile next to my chaise longue, are this year's editions of The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Essays, just so I always have something to dip into.
When I meet someone who wants to be a writer, and yet doesn't read much, I wonder how that works. What would provide you with nourishment, with inspiration? I'm focused on my own writing, students sometimes say. I don't have time to read. Or they tell me they're afraid of being influenced, as if they might catch the voice of another writer like a virulent strain of flu. But reading good prose is influence. When my son was little, he used to imitate Johnny Damon's batting stance, or Roger Federer's topspin forehand. In this way, he began to learn how to play. When we follow the intricate loops of a Pynchon sentence, or pause in the white-space minimalism of Carver, we are seeing what is possible, and we bring that sense of possibility to the page.
Reading is also camaraderie. It is a challenge, a balm, a beacon. "Who would call a day spent reading a good day?" asks Annie Dillard. "But a life spent reading-that is a good life." I try (most of the time I fail, but still, I try) to begin my day reading. And by this I do not mean The New York Times online, or the Vanity Fair lying on the kitchen table, or the e-mails that have accumulated overnight, and which I open at my own risk. The roulette of the in-box! An enticing invitation to a private online sale of gourmet Himalayan sea salt, a high school nemesis emerging from the ether-whatever it is, it's the opposite of reading. It pulls you away, instead of directing you inward.
Fill your ears with the music of good sentences, and when you finally approach the page yourself, that music will carry you. It will remind you that you are a part of a vast symphony of writers, that you are not alone in your quest to lay down words, each one bumping against the next until something new is revealed. It will exhort you to do better. To not settle for just good enough. Reading great work is exhilarating. It shows us what's possible. When I start the morning with any one of the dozens of books in rotation on my office floor, my day is made instantly better, brighter. I never regret having done it. Think about it: have you ever spent an hour reading a good book, and then had that sinking, queasy feeling of having wasted time?
