I know that we’re already a month into 2021, but I’m curious to hear about your reading plans for the year. It’s still cold outside — the temperature is in the single digits and the snow is beaming the sunlight back into the sky — so as far as I’m concerned it isn’t too late to draw up plans for a year of reading.
This year my reading falls into three broad categories, and here they are in the approximate order I’m attacking them.
1. Reading to Help With Writing
This marks the 26th year of work on my serial novel Urbantasm; with two volumes already published and the remaining volumes coming out in 2021 and 2022, I’m rapidly reaching the end of this adventure. But since the books traffic heavily in the history of Flint, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who have called Flint their home, there is a tremendous amount of reading to bring the books to a proper conclusion.
Most immediately, I am finishing Rhonda Sander’s excellent Bronze Pillars: An Oral History of African-Americans in Flint is an invaluable archive of communities that were undervalued and oft-ignored until recently. I say “communities” not least because of the big, bright fault lines that separated the South Side or Floral Park neighborhoods from the North Side or St. John Street neighborhoods.
I am a big believer that one way to read write dynamic, beautiful work is to read dynamic, beautiful work, and in the home stretch of Urbantasm I’ve been channeling some of the most challenging, remarkable writers I’ve known. Last summer I focused on Toni Morrison (Beloved, Jazz, The Bluest Eye, and Sula) and last fall I focused on Fyodor Dostoevsky (Crime and Punishment and The Idiot). I am going to be on a tighter schedule this spring, but I’m hoping to find time to reread William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. I read this book fifteen years ago and was mesmerized by the whirlwind of language and the tragedy and pathos that followed in its wake, and I’m eager to return and rediscover what I missed the first time through.
2. Reading by my Friends
With no offense intended to dead and famous people — they are not dead by choice and often they are famous for good reason — but a priority this year is to further take up reading by my living and not famous friends, who are all talented and trail-blazing in their own ways! Last year I read Lords of Badassery by Reinhardt Suarez, Buick City by Sarah Carson, This Is Not a Love Scene by Shea Megale, and How Fires End by Marco Rafala. Now that it’s 2021 I’m starting off with Motown Man by my good friend Bob Campbell, a story set in what he describes as “a Flint like city” … but we all know it’s Flint!
3. Reading for the Joy of Reading
I never wanted to be a writer until I discovered that reading can be a ton of fun. So even with all of the busyness going on in life these days, I still try to make time to pick up some books just for the joy of it. And for me, there is little more joyful than a rousing adventure story, with sword slinging warriors, nefarious wizards, cunning rogues, and fiendish monsters. Fritz Leiber is one of my favorite for humor, fun, energy, and wit.
What are you reading this year?