As part of a homework assignment for an upcoming writing workshop I'll be attending, I have a list of eleven books to read by the end of September. I received the homework assignment a few weeks ago, when there was still roughly ten weeks to go before the workshop. If I managed to read at least a book a week, I'd keep a steady pace and get the homework done on time.

There is another component to the homework assignment, which is to *not* talk about these books with our fellow workshop attendees, with whom we are all in contact via e-mail. This is a mild form of Chinese Water Torture for those of us in the group who love to talk about books after we've read them.

...Especially when we are all reading these books, and they all end up striking a nerve of one kind or another. There are so many things to talk about; a subplot about writing here, a theme about how people sell out their own best interests there, writing style, standout scenes. The instructors assure us that there is a good reason to wait until the workshop begins before we talk about these books with each other. Since I'm putting my faith in the instructors to help me improve my writing, I'd be foolish not to do the homework.

We're allowed to talk about books, just not with each other. There are many points I've thought about that I've wanted to post up here on my website, but now that my fellow workshoppers know about this house o' cards, I'm worried that if I post something and they read it, I'll be spoiling the purpose of the exercise we've been assigned.

So I guess my book reviews will have to wait. However, I want to share two things with you, in the meantime.

First, reading a book a week has proven to be absolutely exhilarating. I'm a very slow reader. I scrutinize fiction the way I *should* have read text books when I was in college. I know people who can read Stephen King's It in one day and answer questions (correctly) about it later. This is not a skill I have. For me, a book a week is an awful lot of work, not so much because it takes so much effort to read, as it takes so much *time*. Finding the hours has been very difficult, and that means I've had to sacrifice something else in my schedule.

Sleep.

And yet, this intense (for me) period of reading has boosted my energy level and enabled me to get by with less sleep quite easily. I am, in fact, rather an insomniac these days, but that doesn't bother me at all. More time to read. My head is filling up with all sorts of ideas, even when (perhaps especially when) the writing or the story isn't terribly great.

The second thing I want to share with you is a funny (not funny ha-ha) coincidence. In one of the books that I just read, a fictional serial killer had chopped up one of his fictional victims and stashed the fellow's remains in a dumpster right outside the very real building where a former girlfriend of mine used to live. It is bizarre to be reading a book that takes place in a large city you don't know all that well and have one of the few streets you *do* know well described rather specifically as part of a (fictional) crime scene.

Read enough stories that take place in a city you've spent time in, and I suppose something will eventually happen on a street with which you're familiar. In fact, that's already happened for me several times: I've lived all over New England, and I read a lot of Stephen King. But this one resonated a little bit more. It was about a crime that took place outside the building where someone whom I cared about used to live. (Last I heard, she didn't live there anymore, so I'm sure she's safe from the fictional "Curry Hill Carpenter".)

My advice to any of you who would like to avoid such serendipity in your own lives: don't date anyone who lives in New York City. The place is simply too ubiquitous. Date people from Buffalo or Cleveland. Nobody writes novels that take place in Buffalo or Cleveland.

But enough about that scene in NYC. I've finished that novel and it's time to move on to an ironclad at the close of the Civil War....