Keeping Fresh

"All my life I've looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time."
— Ernest Hemingway

A writer friend recommended Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.  The book is a banquet, beckoning me to taste some tender morsels and go back for more at a later date. I feel both pleasure and pain as I read it, like looking at a glorious world through a window. I am somewhat bound by the reality that I can’t seem to find enough time to read all the books I want to AND write all the things I want to. Other moments I feel like I am cheating, as I read a paragraph of Flannery O’Connor followed by a bit of Hemingway. Sweet stuff.