I am curious as to what books you read.
What books are you reading at moment?
How many are you reading at the moment, and by what authors?
Are they contemporary award-winning authors, or traditional authors?
Do you think the authors you read have enhanced your writing skills?
I am reading, Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte.
Idylls of the King - Tennyson.
The English Novel - Walter Allen
Beyond Good and Evil - Nietzche.
Jane Eyre is brilliant.
Idylls of the King is excellent.
The English Novel is an interesting history of the Novel.
Beyond Good and Evil is a challenging read. I will continue to read it a page at a time.
I read on average six contemporary novels to one traditional novel. They are of various genres. I read other books of interest inbetween. I read what I regard is the best adult and childrens literature.
I beieve in reading the broadest range of quality writing. I do not rigidly stick to one genre.
It is by absorbing myself in all forms of the best quality literature, that I hope to learn more and improve as a writer.
I don't agree that reading older works of literature is irrelevant today, simply because the language teaches us nothing about how to address ( read sell to?) a modern audience.
If this were so then there would be no point today in reading the works of Shakespeare, for example, because his language is considered inaccessible to the modern reader.
This, of course, is nonsense. The emotional, psychological and intelligently human prose and poetry of a writer such as Shakespeare, is as relevant today as it was in the 16th century.
If writers in the past had stuck to such a narrow, commercial approach were would we be now then? Living in a world without Nabakov, Hemmingway, Proust, Eliot, etc etc.
How dull a world that would be.
I'd just like to add that I'm always horrified when when writers say they read more than a couple of books a month. The chances are each of the books you read took a year to create. The author laughed and cried as they created the characters and then carefully wove them into a plot which bounced them between various conflicts on the way to a truly fitting end for each. They thought, they cared, they loved and they wrote and then some reading machine came along, devoured it like a big mac and tossed it aside like the wrappings, only to move on to the next.
It's just really heartless reading for the sake of reading instead of for the true enjoyment of the art involved. Even when I'm on holiday I never start a new book in the same week. I need at least 48 hours to think through what I've read, assess it and spend time with the wonderful new characters I've met. Perhaps you could have a think about how you would feel if someone treated your characters with all the interest of a salesman networking and moved on the moment your brief story ended. Maybe it's just me but I love characters far too much to move on just because someone typed the words 'The End.'
Stories never have to end and in my head no story ever does. That's why books are magic.