Why I Read by Jennifer Traig

An occasional feature in our email newsletter is the "Why I Read" column. We've collected some wonderful short essays on the topic from fine writers over the years. Here's what author Jennifer Traig (Devil in the Details, Well Enough Alone, etc.) had to say when we asked her:

I read because there are places I can’t bring my TV and if I’m not stimulated every second of the day my teeth ache with boredom. I read while I walk, while I knit, while I bathe, while I eat. Especially while I eat. My books are, essentially, two-hundred page placemats, stained beyond all recognition with greasy fingerprints and spilled spaghetti sauce.

I read because I can’t stand not to. I get panicky when I don’t have reading material, scanning my surroundings for any words I can find. I have memorized the Muni Night Owl schedule. I know exactly what to do in an emergency on BART. A short list of things I have read when nothing else was available:

· My parents’ Maxima owners’ manual

· AARP magazine

· “Iron: Are You Getting Enough?”

· “Some Facts on Herpes”

· LOTTOPeople Magazine

· Burpee seed catalog

· Map of Los Angeles

· The back of a Safeway receipt

· BEEF (America’s #1 cattle magazine)

· My Kaiser member handbook

· LL Cool J’s autobiography, I Make My Own Rules

I’m sort of lying about that last one. I had other things to read. But it’s true: Ladies Love Cool James, and the book has its moments.

PS. Other installments of the series await you by Beth Lisick, Susan Choi, Peter Rock, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, TC Boyle, Joyce Maynard, Peter Carlson, and Peter Coyote.

Why I Read by Peter Coyote

An occasional feature in our email newsletter is the "Why I Read" column. We've collected some wonderful short essays on the topic from fine writers over the years. Here's what actor and writer Peter Coyote had to say back in April of 2006 when we asked him:

I read, because I prefer being the casting director for my own imagination and expanding my circle of friends to include Odysseus, Anna Karenina, Julian Sorel, Richard III, The Snopses, and old ambidextrous Portnoy. There is no coffee shop or lecture hall in the world that can offer the breadth and depth of humanity I get from spending several hours with a good book. In non-fiction, reading is the perfect antidote to sound-bytes, spin, leaden-headed reporters and talk-radio, which usually sounds like an ad for anger-management classes. Print can be highlighted, reviewed, clipped, scanned and pondered. It is, in effect, in-depth conversation with great and informed minds or wits that make what passes for comedy on TV seems like a runny ichor (a word you won't hear on TV). Surrounding yourself with the concentrated work of men and women who have had the guts and temerity to wrestle with a subject for the length of time required to write a book is a corrective to shallow thought, leaping to conclusions, and running blindly through cross-fires of argument armed only with a pundit’s opinion masquerading as fact. Reading is the deliberate slowing down of the acquisition of knowledge and sensation, based on the time-tested truism that good ideas, like good whiskeys, need to mellow and accrete complexity and flavor over time. Finally, I love the company of books. They rest on my shelves like old companions who are ever ready to summon up shared memories and re-engage and review humanity's finest moments from earlier times.
--Peter Coyote

PS. Other installments of the series await you by Beth Lisick, Susan Choi, Peter Rock, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, TC Boyle, Joyce Maynard, and Peter Carlson. What other authors should we solicit?

Why I Read by Peter Carlson

A few years ago, we started an occasional series in our email newsletter: an original essay by a writer called "Why I Read." We've been reprinting them on the blog on occasion (see below for links to others).

Today's comes from Peter Carlson, who wrote a fine and funny book called K Blows Top. It was our Book of the Month back in June 2009 (my blurb on the book is here; or pre-order the paperback here--it's due in about a month). Without further ado, here's why Peter Carlson reads:

I read to be entertained and enlightened, amazed and amused.

I read to hear great stories and encounter fascinating minds. I read to fall asleep and I read to wake up. I read to learn how the world works, how the other half lives, how we got in this mess and how we can get out. I read to find out what happened yesterday, and also to find out what happened in the Big Bang and the Black Plague and the Black Sox scandal. I read because reading transports me through time and space and I don’t even have to get out of my chair, except to pour more coffee.

When I was in kindergarten, I fell in love with the delightful rhythm and music and wordplay of Dr. Seuss and ever since then I’ve been reading in the hopes of finding a book that made me feel as ecstatic as the good Dr. did. Seuss led me to the zany comic verse of my next literary hero, Ogden Nash. My search for Nash poems led me to anthologies of American humor, where I discovered Mark Twain and William Saroyan, and I haven’t been the same since.

I love how one book leads to another and another and another in a never-ending chain of discovery. I read to satisfy my curiosity, but my curiosity is insatiable, so I keep on reading.

I read everything--newspapers, magazines, novels, poems, biographies, history, e-mail, junk mail, and the backs of cereal boxes, although the quality of cereal box literature ain’t what it used to be. I also read the wisdom inside fortune cookies, always adding the customary implied ending “in bed,” which inevitably improves the message. I also enjoy reading FBI files, in which words, lines, sometimes entire pages are blacked out by G-man censors—a heavy-handed, backhanded tribute to the power of words.

I love the moment when something an author wrote in another time and place makes me burst out laughing. And I treasure the moments when I’ve watched people riding the Metro in Washington read my newspaper stories and laugh out loud. That’s a better award than a Pulitzer Prize, although less lucrative.

Of course, it was my love of reading that led me to start writing in the first place. And attempting to write inevitably gives you a deeper appreciation for what you read. But there is a downside, as any honest writer will admit: You read something that’s really good and you think, Damn, I wish I’d written that.

I‘ve just published a new book —“K Blows Top,” a non-fiction comedy about Nikita Khrushchev’s bizarre adventures in America. I’ll be thrilled if readers think, Damn, I wish I’d written that. The only thing better would be hearing them laugh out loud.

Thanks, Mr. Carlson. Want to read others? On the blog so far: Beth Lisick, Susan Choi, Peter Rock, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, T.C. Boyle, and Joyce Maynard.

Joyce Maynard's "Why I Read"

As I'm still recovering from the holiday rush, let's dip into the "Why I Read" files for today's blog entry, shall we? "Why I Read" is an occasional feature of our email newsletter and a personal favorite of mine. We've been gradually posting them online for all to see. In short, we ask authors why they read.


Today's entry comes from Joyce Maynard, a local author whose works include her memoir of growing up in the 1960s (Looking Back), her early 1990s novel To Die For (later made into a movie) and many more. Her latest book, Labor Day, came out last summer. NPR said that "apart from being a successful thriller, this book is a fascinating portrait of what causes a family to founder, and how much it can cost to put it back on the right path." Here's her original essay:

Truth to tell, I didn’t start out as much of a reader. I watched TV as my own private rebellion against the world of English literature. Child of two English teachers who quoted Shakespeare and eighteenth century poetry at the dinner table, I favored “Father Knows Best” and “Gilligan’s Island.” Still, every night before I went to sleep, my father sat at my bedside, reciting poetry. Sometimes he had me memorize Wordsworth. Sometimes Yeats or Blake. And the rhythms stuck in my brain, even as the sitcom stories faded.

I thought about our old practice of memorizing poetry just the other day, when (having come, a little later than some, to the joy of reading great literature) I had reached that scene in Ian McEwan’s novel, Saturday, in which the young daughter—with her whole family held hostage and a knife at her mother’s neck—recites the poem “Dover Beach” and so disarms the man responsible for the crime that he releases them all. It wasn’t brute force or the heroic arrival of a SWAT team that brought about the family’s release: it was Matthew Arnold’s words.

My father could have recited “Dover Beach.” My mother, too. If I had been a more willing student, I would know the poem better than I do. But the rhythms of poetry—the poetry that was as much a part of dinners in my family as the food set on the table—sustain me still. Poetry can save your life, was McEwan’s message. Not just poetry, either, but language, words, the sound of syllables, the music of sentences.

I will never be a physically powerful person, but with words, well chosen, I take on strength. I know this, as a writer, because I know, as a reader, what other writers’ words have done for me. They open up the universe. They lift me out of myself, revealing a larger world.

Words can save your life, is the lesson. I believe it. That’s why I read.

Thanks, Ms. Maynard. Want to read others? On the blog so far: Beth Lisick, Susan Choi, Peter Rock, Dave Eggers, Daniel Handler, and T.C. Boyle.