August 21st, 2008
Book Talk: What Influences Your Reading Choices?
I’ve always been a sort of cyclical reader. By this I mean that I find an author whose work resonates with me, and I read all of their work as fast as possible, and then I move on. There are a few authors I’ll return to, when they publish something new - Anne Rivers Siddons is one of my favorite guilty-pleasure authors, for example, and even though much of her more recent work has descended into monster-porn and faerie-porn, I’m committed to Laurell K. Hamilton. Sara Paretsky was a favorite when she was writing about V. I. Warshawski, but I’m not as fond of her straight fiction.
More recently, just a couple weeks ago, in fact, I participated in a week-long novel writing workshop. As part of preparing our pitches - the presentation of our premises to agents - we were asked to come up with our comps - the authors whose tone, style, or subject matter is closely related to ours. I went into this workshop thinking I was writing a sweet, proto-literary coffee story that just happened to take place on another world, but, as such projects do, by the time I pitched I had embraced the blatant sci-fi aspects of my story, and thus had to find new comps.
Our workshop leader kept throwing out Vonnegut (flattering, I guess, but I hadn’t read any Vonnegut since I was a kid), and Douglas Adams. Well, Adams was the first real science fiction I ever read. Or at least, the first I remember reading. Not including Star Trek books, and such. And he was funny. But is he really an influence on my writing style? I’m not sure.
What I do know is that the novel I’m now writing, the one I think will actually sell, because my voice is fresh, even though there’s almost no market (I am told) for sci-fi, and especially not sci-fi marketed to women, is much more “Christopher Moore in Space” than Vonnegut.
I know this because last week, after I’d been home a couple of days, I made a beeline for the bookstore, for two reasons. The first was that since April I’ve only read stuff to review for ATG (all of which was lovely, but YA isn’t ALL I want to read), or stuff that was assigned for the workshop - and let me tell you, with the exception of two short stories that were tacked on to our list at the end, the cheeriest of our assigned reading was One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You can see, I’m sure, why I was desperate for new things to read.
The second reason was that I wanted to read some more Moore, and some Vonnegut, to see which of them resonated with me. I also picked up some Haruki Murakami, because his name was tossed about during many debates of Magical Realism vs. Modern Fantasy (it turns out that a book long on my wishlist was one of his titles), and, yes, the most recent offering from the afore-mentioned Anne Rivers Siddons.
My reading choices, then, are influenced by people telling who I write like, by authors who come up in conversation, and intrigue me, and by old habits. Of course, I do browse, reading covers that attract me, or looking for titles I’ve heard mentioned on NPR - and sometimes, sometimes I confound my husband by walking out of the bookstore with nothing, claiming there is nothing to read.
What about you? How do you choose what you read? Who do you like? And who influences your writing?
