Why You Should Stop Reading The Books That You Supposedly Need To Read To Become A Great Writer

For the longest time I use to tell people that my favorite book was Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I never actually finished the book. I liked the first couple of chapters and the throbbing sexual tension between two innocent kids. But after awhile the book began to trail off and I couldn’t find anything to hook me back into it. I felt like I was waiting dearly and patiently through the main character’s naive life hoping to see Estella again, to watch her break down into a lesser and more vulnerable character. I would wisp through pages with anticipation, but by the point where I gave up every night and put the book down, I left feeling frustrated when it wouldn’t bring Estella back to life. My great expectations had fallen short.

I never read another book, except for English class, until I read A Walk To Remember. I was fully infused with the book as I cradled the pages in my fingers for 11 hours until 9am in the morning. I was imprisoned by the book, unable to escape it’s mesmerising bond between it’s characters. I wanted to see how they grew, how they changed, feel their emotional epiphanies. Every time I reached the end of a chapter, I wanted more plot, more words. The book made me hungry. When it was 9am and I finally closed it, finished, I felt. . . well hopefully we all know what a good orgasm feels like.

I’ve tried to read the classics but I only felt like I was lying to myself. I felt that putting myself through the torture of Elizabethean writing would make me a better person and influence my writing for the better. I can’t say it did, or didn’t, because I don’t know if I could gauge that. However, forcing myself to commit to a book was a painful experience. Reading an awful bestseller is like being in a relationship with someone you don’t like but your friends say is good for you. You just can’t wait until it’s over.

Books shouldn’t be like that. By the time you reach that conclusive last sentence, you should feel the pain of letting go of something you don’t want to see fade out and disappear. Stories are supposed to make you happy, at least for as long as it could be in your life.

Why I’m Obsessed With The Hunger Games And Why I Can’t Read It

 

I’ll admit that I’ve repeatedly watched the official trailer for The Hunger Games half a dozen times.
The Hunger Games is an incredible book.  It threads inside your mind and wreaks havoc as it cuts through your body from the inside out.  With every line you could feel your breaths hasten.  With every fleeting sentence the words slowly and painfully crawl up your arms toward your neck.  And, I’ve only read past chapter 2.

By now, after watching the trailer so many times, over and over, I’m sure I’ve become obsessed with this book.  I want to follow the characters, glide through their storyline, and live inside a book about a futuristic depression that pins pre teens and teenagers up against each other in a battle to the death.  However, I can’t read it.  I can’t sit myself down and say, I’m going to let The Hunger Games suck me in.

Reading the Hunger Games, to me, has become a full body experience.  It’s a literary orgasm from the first few lines to whenever it’s impossible to keep going without keeping still.  I just can’t handle that.  That’s just too much for me.  The book is that powerful.  The writing in The Hunger Games has this emotional tendency to strike every chord in the body so perfectly that it becomes a heightened experience.  Each sentence is perfectly crafted to paint a sincere heart throbbing pain.  Back in High School, I once read a book called Night by an author named Elie Weisel.  The book was about a man’s experience through the torturous horrors of the Halocaust.  That book nearly comes close to the pain in The Hunger Games; and The Hunger Games is set in the future.

I can’t read The Hunger Games because I can’t handle that type of pain.  I love the book and practically every aspect of it, but it’s just not something I could handle, and not the way I want to influence my writing.  The writing is spectacular.  The plot is spectacular.  It’s gripping, it’s piercing, it’s everything a book should be.  But, right now, I’m a writer.  I want to find the writing that makes me feel a certain way.  The Hunger Games can’t deliver what I want to feel, right now, in this moment.

There are times when I want to read about a post American Civil War future where children are starving and need to kill each other for food.  But, sometimes, well most of the time, I don’t want to start my mornings feeling that way.

Who The Hell Is Teaching Erin Morgenstern How To Write? | The Night Circus - Review

 

I did some research on The Night Circus earlier this morning.  I’ve even checked out Erin Morgenstern’s blog, thinking that I want to know more about this person who has written this book that I’ve heard so much about.  I’ve heard a lot about The Night Circus.  And, today, when I turned to Amazon to find what books were similar to Carlos Ruiz Zafon’s new book, The Midnight Palace, there it was in the recommended books.

The Night Circus opened to the first page; I can’t remember whether it was numbered or set in roman numerals.  The first few sentences had a somewhat mediocre simplicity, but I said to myself, yeah I’ll get over that.  When I say it read with mediocre simplicity, I mean to say, if a writer was writing to capture the attention of a 9 year old boy, they would use short sentences and smaller words.  That’s understandable.  I could get over that, no big deal.

However, when I came across the second page, my face became flushed from it’s sensibility.

“What kind of circus is open at night,” people ask.  No one has a proper answer, yet as dusk approaches there is a substantial crowd of spectators gathering outside the gates.

You are amongst them, of course.  Your curiosity got the better of you, as curiousity is wont to do.  You stand in the fading light, the scarf around your neck pulled up against the chilly evening breeze. . . 

WHAT THE FUCK!  What the fuck are you talking about Erin???  What the hell is that?  I’m amongst them?  You went into this whole segue to recognize that I’m a reader when the whole point of me reading a book is to be sucked into a story unknowingly.  THAT’S WEIRD!  Now, I’m a reader and a character.  What is this an RPG?  AND NO!  I WOULD NOT WEAR A SCARF!
Who seriously does this?  Are today’s readers actually appreciating that they get to be manipulated into a book via FYI.  The last thing I want to feel when reading a fictional book is to feel like I’m reading.  I want to feel like I’m being sucked in, not, hey you with the book, let me guide you through how you should be feeling at this moment.

I clapped the book closed and said donezo.  Even though I was disappointed, I’ll admit that I carried myself through several lines after reading that paragraph but couldn’t help but regret what I was doing.  It just makes it hard to keep going after such a heavy disappointment.  It’s like going to Disneyland but first the gay security guard has to strip search you.  All this anticipation for something that might be good, but then you ruin it by being such a disappointment right at the beginning of the trip.

I can’t enjoy the rest of my experience when I’m blindsided by such a catastrophe.

Paula McLain Creates a Riveting Concoction of Delicately Woven Lines | The Paris Wife - Review

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too - that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.  - The Paris Wife

The Paris Wife is a riveting concoction of rabid one liners carefully woven into delicate chapters.  I was browsing in the best sellers list and pulled other raved about titles such as Sarah’s Key, The Dovekeepers, The Night Circus.  At the point in which I opened The Paris Wife, I was withered, unamused, and even aggravated by the terrible writing that I explored prior.  I was at the point where I was skimming through the first sentence and saying, yep - crap.  I think I gazed at the first line of The Paris Wife and put it down, pretty much by mistake.  I was too aggravated to read another line and get into a peaceful place in my head where I could thoroughly enjoy a book.

I think I shuffled around the bookstore for a bit, but afterwards, for some reason, I opened The Paris Wife again and there was a line that struck my eyes on the second page.

Across the courtyard, a sawmill buzzed steadily from seven in the morning until five at night, and there was always the smell of fresh cut wood, and sawdust filtered in under the windowsills and doorframes and got in our clothes and made us cough.

Suddenly, I was hooked.  I felt like I finally caught a connection to a book.  The way the words formed in a polite cadence, slowly moving to form a simple yet perfectly rounded picture was incredible.  From that sentence on, I fell into the book unaware of time, place, and the literal action that I was indeed reading a book.

Along with it’s splendor in imagery, The Paris Wife also showed an appetite for dialogue that was courageous and realistic.  Clever, even.  Not clever in a way that most writers take a step back, but say, ha, that sounds clever, people will like that.  Clever in a confident way that says, this is how people talk because I’ve been in conversations and I know what I’m talking about.

The dialogue is full, it’s realistic.  It’s not rushed and it rings like a normal conversation.  Most writers sound like they’re trying to escape having to write dialogue by keeping the voices short, or going off in long monologues.  Nobody talks like that.  Paula Mclain’s writing keeps the dialogue so it actually sounds like the conversations normal people could relate to.  It keeps the space between the phrases, he said and she said, which keeps the focus on what the characters are actually saying.

I’ve caught up to page 12 in this novel.  It’s beautifully written and almost impossible not to get sucked into.

Books Aren't Just Supposed To Be Appreciated

I don’t feel like I need to read a book in it’s entirety to review a book.  I feel that I could read the first few pages of a book and say, “This is bullshit, I shouldn’t have to waste my time reading this crap.”
My name is Jonathan Manor, I write for a blog named Evening Revolution.  A portion of my blog is dedicated to parts of my life through diary entries, a lot of which have caught the interest of some readers because of the way I write.  I’m very meticulous about what read.  I feel that what I read could subconsciously kill or revive my inspiration to write.  Because of that, I’m usually stuck in between aisles at bookstores, libraries, and even the literary racks at grocery stores, trying to find something that I should sacrifice my attention for.

Most of the time, I’ll read the first few pages of a book until I say I’m done with it.  I’ll be disappointed, move on, and try to forget that that book ever existed.  However, there are those rare tiny miraculous moments where I open a book to it’s first page and am sweetly indulged by  every single carefully offered word, sentence, and chapter.

Those books are riveting.  Those books aren’t the books you end up appreciating.  They’re the books you want to grow old with, but can’t help but feel like you’re running out of pages.