Reading Challenges? Count Me Out

Ellen Notbohm

How many books did you read this month? Last year? How many minutes do you spend reading each day? How many pages? Howmanyhowmanyhowmany?

Simple answer: I don’t know. Somewhere north of 100 books a year. I no longer keep score.

But you’re an author! Don’t you keep a list?

True dat, I’m an author, hence my creative space festooned with reminders like Stephen King’s “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things, no shortcut.” And Annie Proulx’s “Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”

I read purely because I want to. It expands me and fuels my writing, but I don’t keep measures of how many words produced, how many minutes butt-in-chair. All that record-keeping feels like a fritter of time better spent writing.

And neither do I keep lists of the books I read. I dropped that habit like kryptonite some years ago when I realized that tracking book stats as if to meet some imaginary bar was sucking some of the spontaneity and joy from my reading.

Not counting frees me to make my own rules.

I read children’s books, because where else can I learn about Harriet Tubman in five minutes, and have her courage and purpose spill over into my own writing? I read instructionals of all stripes—including turn-of-the-20th-century books on how to make homemade toys and how to spot horse sharpers—for the way their logic informs my work. I read reference books, personal accounts, and local histories, their depthless trove of facts and insights spilling like water over Niagara into my fiction and creative nonfiction.

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning,” counsels the incomparable Ray Bradbury. “I never had a dry spell in my life, because I feed myself to the point of bursting.”

That’s why I read in every direction. Broadly, deeply, sideways.

Every year I explore a genre that expands my perspective. The year I focused on foreign authors, Jonas Karlsson’s Swedish novella The Invoice, translated by Neil Smith, embedded itself in me. Seven years on, I carry its small but universal truth every time I pick up my pencil—that no truth is too trivial to write about.

The sheer beauty of the prose in some of those translated books astonished me. I came to appreciate translators as inspirational artists on par with the authors themselves. Solitude, writes Peter Hoeg in Smilla’s Sense of Snow, translated from Danish by Tiina Nunnally, is “the light of grace for me. I never close my door behind me without the awareness that I am carrying out an act of mercy toward myself.” The writer in me bows to this every day.

Another year I focused on unread classics. The Moonstone, with its exquisitely skillful progression of POVs from chapter to chapter,vaulted onto my shelf of lifetime favorites. It lingered, how I must consider the same situation from others’ perspectives, even if writing about myself. Silas Marner wove his way into my heart as few literary dads have with his reluctant, then passionate, embrace of fatherhood. He influenced my novel’s protagonist, which in turn ignited my courage to write about my own parents and myself as a parent, something I thought I could never do.

Each year I also make time to read in a new genre. How can I say that I don’t like paranormal, western, steampunk, slipstream if I’ve never tried? And what bliss it was to spend a summer rereading old favorites—each one a fresh discovery of why I loved them in the first place.

It had to happen, of course—that someone would want an inventory. Chatting with the owner of a local bookstore, I mentioned my year of reading foreign novels. She straightened up, all eager interest. Would I share my list?

Uh . . . I was compelled to admit I’d kept no list.

Where, she persisted, did you get your ideas for what to read?

Well, wouldn’t you know, many of the titles had come from a list compiled by ambassadors to countries around the world, books they deemed representative of those countries’ cultures. I’d tossed the list a while back.

But that enthusiasm on her face! Sure, I promised, I would recreate it from my shelf of books and my library borrowing history.

And I did. My first reading list in years, more than forty titles strong. But whether my bookseller friend ever read Marshall Islands Legends and Stories, Mother’s Beloved: Stories from Laos, or Mordechai’s Mustache and His Wife’s Cats, she never said.

So, what to do with that inert numbered page staring up at me? Could I summon it to life? I glanced at my shelf of foreign novels. I loved looking at that collection…at all my collections. And a collection is not a list. I pulled up an online fillable map of the world and entered my books based on author’s nationality, color coded as fiction, nonfiction, children’s.

See it there on my office wall? Now it’s not a list. It’s art.

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Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than twenty-five languages. She is author of the award-winning novel The River by Starlight and the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew, an evergreen best-seller now in its 20th year. Ellen’s short works appear in numerous literary journals, magazines, and anthologies in the US and abroad. Her books and short fiction and creative nonfiction have won more than 40 awards worldwide.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing