Writing about Reading

My friend SP (who writes an excellent blog at no power in the 'verse) recently shared with me one of her struggles: feeling obligated to write about every book she reads before she lets herself return it to the library (even to the point that she sometimes racks up library fines!).

Now, I certainly have my share of reading-related compulsions.  I keep a spreadsheet in my GoogleDocs with an alphabetized list of authors I like, and I try to read their works in chronological order of publication, resorting to interlibrary loan and field trips to research libraries as necessary.  I have other GoogleDocs for collecting quotes and for keeping track of books I want to read in the future.  Etc.  But until I listened to SP talk about it, I had never thought about whether I feel the need to write about each book that I read.  In my head, reading and writing constitute two fairly separate portions of my life -- but I'm starting to realize that I do have more of a need to connect the two activities than I previously realized.  This has become most evident in my foreign language reading.

What is Creative Nonfiction?

Writing is service.

That is to say, a writer's duty is to bend herself toward building human wellness on every level: individual, interpersonal, local, societal, and global. This is the potential that lies within creative nonfiction: to draw from the wellsprings of the personal in order to illuminate the inner workings of the systemic. And the primary tool of nonfiction: truth.

Before we can come to understand truth, we must be able to recognize its three servants.