Saleema Nawaz, author of the recently published Bone and Bread, winner of the Journey Prize in 2008 for her story My Three Girls, and by many accounts one of Canada’s most exciting young voices, muses on the pleasures of reading without thinking as an author.

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“What’s the one book you wish you’d written?” It’s just a conversation-starter in an interview. Not a real question, but a fun little segue that gives you an opening to talk about a book you really, really like, probably one that struck a personal chord. (Or more horrible to contemplate: one that happened to line up almost exactly with your two-thirds finished draft.) When a radio producer asked me this on the fly, it caught me off-guard. At the time, I stammered out something about Alice Munro, but since then the question has been simmering in my mind—rankling, really—bubbling up here and there with an excess of esprit d’escalier.

The fact is that reading is different when you’re a writer. Not always, but often. When you spend all your time with words, you can’t help but notice what’s really on the page. When writing is your work, reading—formerly one of your greatest pleasures in life—becomes increasingly fraught. Everything is research. Everything is a trick to be used or avoided. Bad prose you might once have simply skimmed over starts to give you nausea … or rage. Good prose elicits a mix of admiration and jealousy (soon yielding to despair) at the revelation of somebody else’s brilliance.
At worst, your taste becomes too engrained, or brittle. Or you pledge allegiance in some kind of style or genre war and renounce enjoyment forever. At best, your attention is drawn more frequently to the art and the artifice than to the story being told. This is useful and necessary. You need to read widely to become a better writer. You need to absorb new ideas and techniques. But you have also become harder to please. You are the finicky eater at the book buffet, despite having one of the most ravenous appetites.

What book do I wish I’d written?

In one sense, what don’t I wish I’d written? If wishes were novels, we’d all have overflowing shelves. A Booker-winner? A Pulitizer-winner? Any NYT bestseller? Maybe a slim but weighty volume of poetry? Something else to show my astounding range? While I’m at it, I really wish I’d written the Harry Potter books. Or the Bible. Why not?

But as for the books I love the most—the ones that have inspired me, the ones that have taken me into their worlds and made me who I am—I don’t wish I’d written any of them. 

The writer’s relationship with her book is different from the reader’s relationship with it. Yes, there are moments of joy in writing, of fantastic surprise, of a kind of inexpressible alchemical SOMEthing, but for most writers, there is a lot of hard work. A lot of dedication and exasperation. A lot of ex-noses cruelly destroyed by the grindstone.

The truth is that suspension of disbelief is not possible when you are the one composing 450 pages … not to mention the extra 200 or so that will never see the light of day. You care about your characters and what they go through, but you also know what might have happened, or even what did happen before you hit the delete key. The architecture of the physical world of the novel is one that you have put up by hand, staying up late at night to nail together the backdrop and do the set dressing. The novel you wrote yourself is, among other things, a memento of your own exhaustion and solitude.  It is also something greater than the sum of these parts, although you are not one of the people who can see it clearly.

The books that you love—that transport you, that allow you even to momentarily forget about awkward flashbacks or jarring adverbs or your own woeful inadequacies as an artist—are a gift. There are so many books I’m so grateful not to have written. As a reader, I wouldn’t trade them for anything.