Reading to resurrect

My friend Maria asked a question I loved the other day. I am not sure that Bluesky allows embedding of posts, so I am just going to quote her instead: “What is your resurrector book? By which I mean, the book you go to when you feel like you're creatively blocked (not a religious text, though if it's one of those that works too), the one that reminds you genius writing exists in the world?”

I talk more here about who I am as a reader than as a writer, though of course the two cannot be completely separated, and the things I read have always shaped who I am as a writer, even from the very beginning – I wouldn’t have wanted to tell stories of my own if I hadn’t fallen in love with the telling of stories in general.

Interestingly, becoming a writer has definitely reshaped my relationship to reading. When I started writing seriously, I very much read with an eye to learning as much as I could from each book – what was the author doing, in terms of craft? How were they doing it? What was effective? What wasn’t? What could I borrow or do better in my own work? It got to the point where I began to wonder if I’d ever be able to turn that part of my brain off, and just read like a reader again. (Answer: Yes, but not for a while. And then not without effort. Even now, any book that sweeps me up so much that I don’t read it with at least part of one eye on craft is a gift.)