Once I sat in a room with many young people and Denis Johnson--brought to the many young people by the gentleman in the title of this post--and DJ said something that at the time surprised me, but does not now. Someone, a young person, asked him who/what he read of late and he said that he didn't read that much anymore, and that he rarely finished books.
I guess I bring this up because I haven't finished a book since school ended, haven't even started one for months. Granted I'm in a state of mind right now that precludes ambitious activities such as novel-reading, but aside from that is it possible that my present and Denis Johnson's at-least-past are the kinds of future we novelists have to look forward to? Because for real, how or why would I devote time and energy to keeping track of another narrative when it's as much as I can do--usually more than I can do--to keep track of my own?
Or maybe it's a little like the bluegrass musician who listens to death metal when he comes home from the studio (Believer readers check out your July 2004 issue, the interview with John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats), or the software tester who wants, when he comes home, nothing to do with computers or the internet (see Park, Eddie). Or the gerontologist who needs to molest children. That sort of thing.
But so the thing I'm saying or the question I'm asking is this (and I guess this is more for the novelists than the poets): how many writers do we know who also are voracious readers of books and novels? I'm being lazy--I know this--and certainly I could knock off at least one short story a week just on my BART rides into and back from the city--ibid, and to a greater degree, poems--but am I being that lazy?
Also, who's with me on changing our moniker from "a 'place / to put the precious useless things'" to "a 'sieve... / to put the precious useless things'"? It seems, perhaps, more fitting? As in, on a daily basis we lose so much, even if we "place" it in a forum such as this....
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I don't know if I'd say I'm a voracious reader of books and stories, but I do think I read quite a bit. It's not that I don't finish any books; I probably go through a novel a month, at least, and at least a handful of short stories--I'm not saying that's a ton, but it's something--but to every book I finish I probably start at least five, six, maybe more. Only one of those crop ever makes it to the end. Which is why my reply to "Have you read this" is so often "Sigh. I didn't finish it."
I am having a hard time keeping track of my own narrative, though; it's like I have thrown ten, twenty balls in the air and am having trouble keeping track of them all, let alone catching them and tossing them back out there. But I think reading other people's narratives is more inspiring than distracting. It's really instructive to me, even if some of the time the instruction is more of what I don't want to do than what I do want to do. I do worry that sometimes I'll go back and what I've been reading is so transparently evident in my writing: Oh, here was my Housekeeping phase; here was Ian McKewan; here was William Maxwell. Sigh.
I didn't read anything at all except poetry and short stories for the entire time I was writing my novel. I couldn't do it. Reading other novels seemed distracting. I was afraid that reading other novels would influence my work, so I shied away from reading other novels like they were contagious.
Now that I'm done and waiting, I'm reading novels again. I'm suspecting that will stop once I start writing another novel.
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