On the Experience of Entering a Bookstore in Your Forties (vs. Your Twenties) by Steve Edwards is interesting for a variety of reasons and it's much more than the title might suggest:
It's one take on why the advice to read widely is good advice and has a deeper meaning than those simple words might suggest, as well as being an essay on relative life experience in both reading choices and in writing.
That second quote is to me what the experience of "read widely, read deeply" is all about—another lens not to supplant life experience, but to enhance it. And "the meaning of books as you grow older".
It's quite a good essay if you have the time to read it; it isn't terribly long, but it does foster deep thinking about our reading choices as writers.
It's one take on why the advice to read widely is good advice and has a deeper meaning than those simple words might suggest, as well as being an essay on relative life experience in both reading choices and in writing.
As a young writer, I thought I had to read widely in order to learn different authors’ styles and sentence structures and voices. I thought I needed a sense of what sang and what sold, what had been done and done to death. But what I needed more than anything were the consequences of my choices. I needed to live the lives the books I read compelled me to lead . . .
Entering a bookstore now, at 44, with the benefit of hindsight, the choices I made as a young writer seem almost inevitable. My early love of Thoreau and nature writing and solitude led me to John Muir, Rachel Carson, Mary Austin, Loren Eiseley. Then I found Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Linda Hogan. I read Alice Walker’s In Search of our Mother’s Gardens. Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.
I wanted to know what they knew and make a practice of looking at the world—critically and creatively—through the lens of place.
That second quote is to me what the experience of "read widely, read deeply" is all about—another lens not to supplant life experience, but to enhance it. And "the meaning of books as you grow older".
It's quite a good essay if you have the time to read it; it isn't terribly long, but it does foster deep thinking about our reading choices as writers.
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