What a joy it is to read, and how important as a writer. It is joyful to read different texts and see how they fuel the creative process. Cosmicomics has inspired a short story. Love in the Time of Cholera reminds me how fluid time, language and can be reminiscence. I always think about Marquez’s writing as non-linear and yet in some ways it is quite linear; my mind darts like a fish between the then and now, a collage of memory. I’m afraid Jonathan Livingston Seagull reminded me of what I don’t like in beast fables and what I especially don’t like in spiritual teaching stories – but even there there was benefit. Jonathan Livingston Seagull reminded me of the down to earth fables and teaching stories from China and Japan I loved and read as a child.

Books I have read since last I posted (I think this is complete, though I may have forgotten some):

• Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino
• 40 Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson
• Jonathan Livingston Seagull, by Richard Bach (recommended by friends as an animal fable worth reading)
• Epileptic volume 1 by David B, translated by Kim Thompson
• Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand
• Short stories scattered across the internet

Reading pile

• Best of Michael Swanwick
• Three Guineas, Virgina Woolf
• Yellow Blue Tibia, Adam Roberts
• About Writing, Chip Delany
• Various short story magazines and too many open tabs