I know, I know, I need to get with the writing

Ok, I'll admit... I have not been so much with the writing lately. It's been an incredibly busy and mentally draining month. But I have been with the reading:

Bite Me by Christopher Moore
The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner by Stephenie Meyer
The Sandman Papers edited by Joe Sanders
By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept by Paulo Coelho

Paulo Coelho is one of the strangest authors that I read. I can't get my head around him and constantly vacillate between loving his work and finding it to cloying. I've previously read Brida, The Alchemist, The Witch of Portobello, and Veronika Decides to Die. Each is a small gem, combining beautiful language and spiritual sensibilities that, while I do not share, I can appreciate. Yet when I look at all of these works together, I want to groan a little. It becomes almost pedantic.

I just started reading Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark this morning. Man, but his voice is the most distinct of any author I've read. You can pick any sentence out of context and say, "Yup, that's McCarthy."

The only other of his books that I have read is The Road. Brilliant, of course, but also problematic for me. And here is my problem: I read the road well over a year and a half ago and while it blew me away, I haven't picked up another McCarthy book since. Why? Because it fucked me up. Big time. And while it takes an incredible author to get into a reader's psyche so completely, it also does the author and reader a disservice. I've been scared to go through such a dark, intense experience again.

An unintended thread running through all of the books I have recently read is they influence of one book upon another: within the same series (as with Moore and Meyer), those which it comments on (Sanders), and other books by the same author (McCarthy and Coelho). We do not read any individual book in a vacuum and they are each in dialogue with that which we have already read or will read. (My college mise en scene professor will be proud of that I've written that.)

Not sure what implications this thought will have on my own writing, but it is an observation that I will try not to forget.