Reading

Pretend that you are always carrying a small red backpack.  You can put anything into it: what you read, what you do in life, what you see or hear others do.  And when you’re ready to write, just reach in and pull things out.

Pages in, pages out.

CURRENTLY READING: Pricksongs & Descants by Robert Coover, Duende: Poems by Tracy K. Smith, Jason & the Golden Fleece by Apollonius of Rhodes

Some of my favorite fiction/literature: The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, The Sound and the Fury, Waterland, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, Kafka on the Shore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, The Bell Jar, The Bird Artist, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Everything Is Illuminated, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, Housekeeping, Gilead, The History of Love, Perfume, The Cement Garden, Atonement, Lolita, Pale Fire, Special Topics in Calamity Physics, The Time Traveler’s Wife, A Passage to India, The Corrections, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Cat’s Cradle, Breakfast of Champions, Slaughterhouse Five, Madame Bovary, Siddhartha, Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams etc., Nine Stories, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Passion, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Princess Bride, Midnight’s Children, Einstein’s Dreams, Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, The Children’s Hospital, The People of Paper, The Hours, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dharma Bums, On the Road, The Memory Artists, Till We Haves Faces, In Cold Blood, White Noise, 1984, Brave New World,  White Noise, The Shadow of the Wind, Mrs. Dalloway, White Teeth, The Blind Assassin, The Handmaid’s Tale, The God of Small Things, The Alchemist, Tender is the Night, Ubik, William S Burroughs, any magical realism
(The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel of all time. It is the greatest novel of all time. I will not debate this. [And, my favorite chapter is Chapter VI.])

In Particular These Stories: “Along the Frontage Road” (Michael Chabon), “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), “Hills Like White Elephants” (Hemingway), “No One’s a Mystery” (Elixabeth Tallent), “Happy Endings” (Margaret Atwood), “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” (Raymond Carver), “Teddy” (Salinger), “The A&P” (Updike), “Face” (Alice Munro), “The Library of Babel” (Jorge Louis Borges), “The Grasshopper and the Bell Cricket”  (Yasunari Kawabata), “The Swimmer” (John Cheever), “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere” (ZZ Packer), “The Nose” (Nikolai Gogol), “The Falling Girl” (Dino Buzzati), ”Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” (Murakami), “The Personal Touch” (Chet Williamson), “A Questionnaire for Rudolph Gordon” (Jack Matthews), ”Bullet in the Brain” (Tobias Wolff), “The Firebird’s Nest” (Salman Rushdie), “Mr. Dark’s Carnival” (Glen Hirshberg), Any: Lorrie Moore (especially Lorrie Moore!), Aimee Bender (especially Aimee Bender!), Jorge Louis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Amy Hempel, Miranda July, Jhumpa Lahiri, David Foster Wallace, Sylvia Plath, Poe, Donald Barthelme, Augusten Burroughs, David Sedaris, Isak Dinesen

Poets: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Kimberly Johnson, Bruce Beasley, Melissa Morphew, Lucie Brock-Broido, Alex Lemon, Diane di Prima, Robyn Ewing, Christopher Bursk, Dean Young, James Wright, Charles Wright, Charles Simic, Greg Orr, Debra Nystrom, Lisa Russ Spaar, Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, Mark Strand, Joshua Clover, e e cummings,  TS Eliot, Adrienne Rich, Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, Margaret Atwood, Louise Gluck, Lorna Goodison, Tracy K. Smith, Mary Oliver, Carl Sandburg, CK Williams, William Carlos Williams, Stanley Kunitz, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Rainer Maria Rilke, Sappho, Anne Carson, John Keats

In particular, the plays: Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Equus, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, The Importance of Being Earnest

Canonical Epics.  Obscure Epics. The Canongate Myth Series.

And good God, my friends.