Author Barbara Kingsolver has an interesting web site. There are small excerpts from many of her works — these alone are worth the price of admission — and the FAQs are informative.
Is it possible to become a writer if you don’t like to read?
Answer: Not on your life.
Believe it or not, someone really did write to ask me that. (I’m tempted to reply: If you didn’t like Dalmatians, would you breed them?) But in all fairness, many more people have asked these interesting questions: Who are your favorite authors? What one book would you take to a desert island? And finally, Do you read other people’s books while you’re writing?
I read as if time were running out, because technically it is. As I grow older I find I’m increasingly impatient with mediocre entertainments: I want books that will take my breath away and realign my vision. As a writer of fiction, I mostly read contemporary fiction, but I also return constantly to the classics. My favorite dead authors are probably George Eliot, Jane Austen, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. Among my favorite living ones are Doris Lessing, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, Isabel Allende, Russell Banks, Linda Hogan, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty and Reynolds Price. And I rely on Emily Dickinson, Sharon Olds, Pablo Neruda, Dylan Thomas, and William Shakespeare; I immerse myself often in poetry, I guess, for the same reason painters rinse their brushes — to keep the colors true. I also love memoir if it’s truly great, which is to say, about something larger than one person’s life (Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; Margaret Mead’s Blackberry Winter; Nancy Mairs’s Waist High in the World), and I’m devoted to good science writing (Darwin for the poetry of his world view; Stephen Jay Gould for the insight).
If I were exiled to that famous island where they only let you take one book, I would cheat and take two: George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
I’ve heard writers say they don’t read other books while they’re writing, for fear it will somehow contaminate their style. I don’t share this worry. When I’m writing, I read Steinbeck and Shakespeare with all my might, and pray to be contaminated.