“Read what you resist.”
We love to love to books we love, but let’s face it, everyone’s got a book they hate. My particular nightmare book happens to be “The Grapes of Wrath.” And there are many other canonical writers whose material I’ve also struggled with. I won’t list names, to save embarrassment.
At the 2012 Loft Mentor Series’ first mentor seminar, poet Leslie Adrienne Miller (Yesterday Had a Man In It, The Resurrection Trade) advised all of us to go back to those writers we resisted, to those books that we just couldn’t vibe with (my words here.) Her paraphrase: “The most dangerous thing for a writer to do is to pick X and say ‘I like X,’ then carve out a little niche and only read that. That is death to the writer.”
She said that as a teacher, she took care to always a pick a book that she disliked, but critics and other readers did tend to like. “Invariably, my students teach me to like it.”
There are things to learn even from writers we do not immediately feel drawn to, writers whose styles are antithesis to our own. Nevertheless, there is something to study there and something to gain from the reading.
That said, I will be revisiting that old turtle on the side of the dusty road, making the slow, slow journey down Steinbeck’s words.
