The Three Rs – reading, ‘riting & respiring

“Reading is breathing in, writing is breathing out,” I saw on Twitter the other day, but I’ve not been doing either. I barely read a single book while I was working full-time. Maybe that’s why I haven’t written – maybe I can’t breathe out until I’ve inhaled.

[image error]I’m trying. I took Michael Connelley’s Dark Sacred Night on the train with me last week, but it pissed me off because it had a woman trying to set up a famous man by claiming rape when clearly she’d consented (and, phew, he was videoing all his sexual encounters, just so he had his back covered in these paranoia-inducing #metoo times). Like that’s the issue…

[image error]I’ve just finished Blue Moon. I’m a huge fan of Lee Child but I read this week he’s handing Jack Reacher over to his brother to write, and I couldn’t help but get the feeling he was a bit bored in this. And while I want to believe in a superhero who’s going to save us all, these days it’s getting harder to pretend a big, white American guy has ever been the answer to any of life’s problems.

Truth is, I haven’t read a book I’ve loved since Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and that was yonks ago. Part of my problem is for seven years I worked as an editor for a well-known literary consultancy, which meant reading lots of unpublished manuscripts. I learned more about writing from this experience than from anywhere else – nothing highlights better what works than seeing what doesn’t.  I’ll remember some of those manuscripts for the rest of my life, for both good and bad reasons.

But whilst reading with a red pen in hand, looking for flaws, might make for a better writer, it ruins the art of reading. And without reading, writing loses meaning.

So, third up on my list of 50 things to do at 50 is to read a book that reignites my love of reading and when I do, to write and thank the author, because not reading feels like such a loss.

I’ve decided I need to approach this as if I were looking for a new lover and so, I’ve joined the literary equivalent of a dating agency – a book club.

I’ve only ever attended a book group as a writer, dropping by to see what they think of my novel or as a teacher (a particularly hard-core book group, where reading was more for self-improvement than for pleasure. We read Hard Times by Dickens, which just about summed it up for me). This is the first time I’ve joined a book group as a punter.

Luckily, I can’t make the first meeting, so it gives me a bit of time to steel myself for social interaction and, of course, to read a whole novel [Where The Crawdads Sing] that I haven’t chosen, without a red pen in my hand.