Joy: The Love of Reading Leads to the Joy of Writing

I love reading — probably even more than writing. First thing each morning I pick up a book, usually on some aspect of writing, and read for about 15 minutes. By doing this at the start of every day when the remaining strands of my subconscious still thread through my conscious mind, I fill my mind with things that are important to me and feed my subconscious, centering my mind for the day ahead. There is nothing like beginning the day in the company of an author who tickles my brain cells.

Recently I picked up a book that promised to make my morning reading ritual an absolute delight. I’ve only read the introduction but my imagination and my love for books is so thoroughly captured I know I will greedily devour the rest of the pages. The book is Robert Schwartz’s For the Love of Books: 115 Celebrated Writers on the Book They Love Most, and I believe it falls under the Gee-I-wish-I’d-done-that category. Cast your eyes on this:

Bookstores were of course my weakness and ultimately my way back. As solace from an otherwise law-benumbed life (He had just graduated from law school.) I was soothed by the symmetry of aisles and sections; mesmerized by the vast compression of facts, ideas, lives, epochs, travels, and regions of the heart. Books of imperishable charm, of bracing or painful insights, endless realignments of twenty-six letters — all contained in one impossibly small and dense place, a paradoxical mix of tranquility and sheer explosive power — as if a bookstore or library can be said to breach some law of physics or create a new one all its own, like a nuclear bomb with good intentions. Reading for me had become fun again but no mere parlor game. I would read, as readers do, to tame the unfamiliar or see the familiar through new and enlightened prisms; to see how different, or eerily familiar, another person’s interior life could be from my own.

I have been reading for so many years that I cannot remember a moment when words did not light up my life. I’m an only child. Books are my friends, authors my siblings. I delved deep into experiences, lived well with characters, learned much from the lessons woven tightly into the fabric of the stories. Books are so much more than words on paper; they are conversations. So when I scanned these words, I understood.

Writing, after all, seemed to me the most important thing one could do crawling between heaven and earth for a lifetime, even if I could not say why. Even if, having read the entire set of Paris Review interviews, I could still not really say what writers did or how they did it. Or how their words came together or pulled apart or crumbled in their hands in the course of infinite reshaping.

Bookcases full of slipcovered Heritage books lined the walls of my parents’ home. At thirteen I fell in love with Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, and over the next ten years re-experienced those words and images through an annual re-reading of Stone’s masterpiece. Like Michelangelo, I felt the coolness of the marble, heard the tap of the sculptor’s hammer; saw the figure in the block. I didn’t realize for many years, but that book played an important part in sparking my desire to understand the creative process and later to become a writer. My 1963 edition with full color plates is a treasure that has surfaced during the high and the low tides in my life. A memory held close to the heart is not only meeting the author the year before he died but having him sign my worn copy that had survived my growing up, a flood, and even a fire.

Article Author: Vikk Simmons

Vikk has a traveler’s soul and an explorer’s spirit and the two feed her main habits: reading and writing. Fully socialized, you can find her on Facebook and Twitter. Her work includes 3 travel books, 2 teen novels, and online writing for MSN City …

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