I first started keeping track of every book I read in 2014, in a word document titled BOOKS. Before this, I never really logged what I read, and I think because of that my reading habits were very haphazard—I’d read here and there, but never very regularly, which in retrospect I find extremely embarrassing given that I had such grand ambitions of one day becoming a famous fiction writer (I’ve actually encountered quite a few people like my younger self, who so badly want to be writers but who don’t actually read many books). In 2014, though, I decided to track what I read—and at the end of the year, I was embarrassed to discover that I’d started 34 books and only finished 23 (for an average reader with a full time job, this number isn’t that bad, but I was someone who claimed to be devoting his life to writing literature). If I hadn’t tracked my reading, the number would likely have been even lower.
I made a conscious decision then to read more books. As a result, my 2015 numbers were better: by the end of the year, I’d started 71 and finished 41, almost double from the previous year (this was also the year I discovered audiobooks, which helped quite a bit). Then, in 2016, I surprised even myself: by the end of the year, I’d started 116 books and finished 78. The next year, 2017, I started 141 and finished 99. For 2018, then, I’ve set a goal to read over 100.
There’s an argument I’ve heard that reading so many books actually leads to a shallower understanding of literature and that it’s better to read fewer books and think about them more deeply. But my own experience proves otherwise. I thought about each of the 99 books I read in 2016 just as deeply as I did the 23 I read in 2014—in fact, it’s likely I thought about the 99 more, since I was spending so much more of my life engaging with books. More importantly, between 2015 and 2018, when I read all those books, my own fiction writing improved dramatically: I landed my first short stories in literary magazines, rewrote my debut novel from scratch and then had it accepted for publication, finished a collection of linked stories I feel extremely confident about, and wrote substantial portions of my second novel. Above all, I “found my voice” as the writer’s cliche goes. And I don’t think it’s an accident that my literary success occurred alongside my new reading habits.
But why? What is the connection between reading a lot and becoming a better writer? As it turns out, I discovered a possible answer in one of the books I read in 2016, a nonfiction work about Islamic architecture by Mohammed Hamdouni Alami entitled Art and Architecture in the Islamic Tradition: Aesthetics, Politics, and Desire in Early Islam (2010). In a chapter on poetry, Alami recounts an anecdote, likely apocryphal, about the famous 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas, as reported by the 14th-century lexicographer Ibn Manzur:
When Abu Nuwas asked his teacher Khalaf al-Amar to authorize him to compose his own verses, Khalaf answered: ‘I shall not authorize you until you will have learned by heart a thousand old poems.’ Abu Nuwas disappeared for some time; then he returned and announced to his master that he had memorized the required number of verses. And in fact he went on reciting them for several days. Then he reiterated his original request. Khalaf hinted to his pupil that he would not authorize him to compose verses until he had completely forgotten all the poems he had just learned. ‘This is too hard,’ said Abu Nuwas, ‘I put so much effort in memorizing them.’ But the master was firm on his point. And Abu Nuwas had no choice but to retire for a certain time in a monastery, where he occupied himself with everything except poetry. When he felt that he had forgotten all the poems, he returned to his master, who finally authorized him to begin his poetic career.
It’s an odd little story, but Alami’s commentary explains it well:
…what did Abu Nuwas learn through this instruction? Did he really just build and dismantle a poetical memory, or did he in the process gain some ability…What is essential in memorizing and forgetting? Is it the dismantled remains left in the memory of the student, or the acquisition of a sense of poetic form that will enable him to forge his own poetic forms? It is certainly this ability, this inherent sense of poetic form, that Abu Nuwas’s teacher was trying to instill in him. It is the basic poetic form that the 1000 ancient poems have in common, and that will endure as a trace after the poems are forgotten, that Abu Nuwas was expected to acquire.
In the same way, I’ll almost certainly forget the details of many of the books I read. But hopefully, like Abu Nuwas, I will retain the form, “a trace” as Alami puts it, which will help me with my own work.