Matthew Savoca, On Reading

"When I was twelve or so, I read White Fang, Call of the Wild, and this other book that I have never since been able to find the title of. It was called Flight of something or Plight of something. It involved a wolf again. It was about a wolf named Gray who killed some other dog or something and then a farmer was trying to kill him, but the young boy loved the wolf so he ran away with him to save him. They lived in the woods on the run. After those books about boys and wolves, I think I read Congo and then Sphere by Michael Crichton. After that, I didn't read anything for a really long time. Then when I was twenty or so, I started reading again since I didn't own any 'going out' clothes. I read lots of classics that I hadn't been reading and then I read almost everything by Hemingway and then basically everything by any Russian writer. Eventually I started reading much more contemporary writing which I sort of felt pretty unexcited about until I ended up finding writers like Frederick Barthelme, Ann Beattie, Jean Rhys, Richard Yates, etc. and occasionally a really good older book like I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. But I don't really read so much anymore. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's because I'm past the age of 27 which I think is when certain people lose interest in stuff for a period of anywhere between 3 months and 11 years, at the end of which they begin to get interested in things again, maybe."


{Matthew Savoca (born USA 1982) is the author of long love poem with descriptive title, a poetry book to be published in September 2010 by Scrambler Books. Visit his website here for more information.}