Sometimes cravings

I constantly crave reading. The escape into a story. I sometimes crave writing. The process. The putting together of words. The release.

In Nov, an author< Mark Spragg, is visiting KS for a workshop and I get to be his chauffeur. I have not read his work, but plan to, of course, before his visit. His most well-known work is An Unfinished Life. It was made into a film (his wife wrote the screenplay) starring Robert Redford and Morgan Freeman.

I found an interview w/him and I liked this paragraph:
"I was awfully fond of Hemingway when I was a boy, no doubt for obvious reasons, but when I found Faulkner it changed my whole sense of the possibilities of language. I suppose everything I've tried to write since then has been an experiment in how best to structure a convincing narrative suspended between those two poles. I read, and reread, Welty, O'Connor, Lee, Capote, Steinbeck, a little later, Gide, Kazantzakis, Garcia Marquez, Hesse, Rilke, Miller. In short, I read every damn thing I could get my hands on. I do remember being greatly influenced by Lawrence Durrell. Also, from the time my brother and I were nine until we were in our mid-teens, my father required that we read a book a month of his choosing, and that at the end of the month we give an oral and written report of that book. My dad read largely for argument–and so his reading list included Darwin and Kant, Kierkegaard. Rousseau, Machiavelli, Spinoza, Emerson, Franklin, Plato, Marcus Aurelius. There were many others. There was a lot of chest-pounding and foot-stomping in our discussions. He told us that there were only two great themes. Our deaths, that is, our concerns about a possible afterlife, and our couplings in the face of that inevitability. I once asked him–it was when I was solidly a teenager–whether a truly great writer shouldn't concentrate his efforts on necrophilia. He didn't laugh. He suggested I reread Kierkegaard."

You read a lot about the writing process, but not so much about the reading process. Perhaps because it seems like it is natural and just happens. I disagree with that, however. I think people make conscious choices about how they want (or don't want) reading and books to be a part of their lives. And that relationship between what you read and what you write... there's a connection.