I read to write...

June 26, 2023

Writers are readers. I firmly believe it’s essential for people to read and read widely (I know, persistent prejudice of a former English teacher), because writers open the world and in places where most of us never choose or have to journey. Writers take us to real worlds, fantasy worlds, potential worlds. They immerse us in love, war, creation, despair, hope, joy, fear, abomination, spirituality, aspirations, grief, loss. They allow us to see life through many different eyes and from vastly different perspectives.
 
I was asked last week what I read, especially as I write in specific genres. It’s expected I read fantasy since I write fantasy, but I rarely do nowadays, and for two reasons. I don’t want to copy other fantasy writers, and I don’t want my stories to be influenced by what others are writing while I’m writing my stories. When I read fantasy it’s always between projects and never during.

So what have I been reading this year? Here’s a quick list (and not everything is listed):

• Guns, Germs and Steel – Jared Diamond
• Red Notice – Bill Browder
• A Short History of the World in 50 Lies – Natasha Tidd
• The Book of Roads & Kingdoms – Richard Fidler
• The Myth of Normal – Gabor Mate
• Novelist as a Vocation – Haruki Murakami
• Gut – Giulia Enders
• Getting Published – Juliet Rogers
• The Writer’s Journey – Travis Elborough
• Just One Thing – Dr Michael Mosley

and I’m about to begin Fabric – Victoria Finlay. These are coupled with regular daily articles in The Conversation and multiple other sources. I haven’t included TED talks.

​The list will tell you I’m an eclectic reader with a recent focus on personal wellbeing and history. There is the ubiquitous pile of books waiting to be read that inevitable never shrinks because as books come off the pile more climb on. One of my favourite memes is the one that claims I’m not responsible for buying books because I was left unsupervised in a bookstore! And I’m not even remotely in the league of many of my writerly and readerly friends whose houses are literally consumed by books.

As a child I dreamed of living in a house with a library. I have managed to construct a cheap version (Ikea, Bunnings, and leftover wood) of what I dreamed across one wall (I’d love to fill the other three!)

​My library was vaster at one stage, but I left behind five tea chests of books in Brunei – basically all my university English course classics. C’est la vie. At university I studied English, Philosophy and History majors, with Education minors in curriculum, psychology, pedagogy. Consequently, I read an awful lot of the literary ‘classics’ (prose and poetry), history tomes (predominantly Australian, Asian and American histories), and more philosophy than I could eat (European and Eastern traditions). As an English teacher, I read and taught multiple classic and popular texts not studied at university.

My love for reading was fostered in three places. As a pre-schooler, my grandfather used to read newspaper articles to me. At home, my parents had a very tiny book collection that included Readers Digest condensed novels and I read these avidly. At school, there was the SRA Reading library and I devoured it, and the school library itself was a haven on wet days and days when relationships with other kids were not as joyous as I hoped. And I won books as school prizes, all of which I still have.
 
Without reading, I doubt I could write, not because of a lack of ideas, but because all those writers – thousands of them –  taught me the art of writing and I am forever in their debt.