Read? Or Write?

Since my writing class ended in May I haven't written anything (unless blogging counts) and decided to dedicate this summer the Summer of Reading. See, during class it takes everything I've got each week to come up with one two-page double spaced piece of something creative and meaningful and hopefully funny with no cliches and no typos. If I dare to pick up a book, the voices start in, "What, and you think your piece is good enough that you've got all this extra time to dawdle? Huh?" So, class over and the voices quieted, I'm on a reading roll. I realized today that so far, totally unintentionally, they all have something to do with writing or reading or book clubs. First up was Certain Girls - found it in the NY Times magazine as a must read about a woman that wrote a risque book in her youth that comes back to haunt her. Then the "How To Buy A Love of Reading" about a teenager that hates to read so her ostentatious, wealthy parents "buy" her an author to write her a book she'll like. Great lessons in writing. The Wednesday Sisters - an actual assignment for my own July book club (we're meeting at Durants for a swanky happy hour, and I can just imagine The Wednesday Sisters sitting at a table next to us, laughing about the same things we laugh about). My current just can't put it down book, is The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, picked by Jo. I had my own little contest with myself during our Grand Canyon trip how many times I could appropriately use the word Guernsey (got up to at least five, by the way) since it was a new word to me. According to my friends (not the city girls) everybody said the word was a type of cow, but now I know it's so much more than that as I read about the incredible island off of England and some amazing characters. So now that my reading roll seems to have found a theme, I figure I have to stick with it. Or, I could stop stalling, grab a pen and write something.