Reading as a writer

I used to love to read. When I was in middle school I would take books out of the library in stacks of ten or fifteen. (I lived in a small town and our library had no limits on borrowing, not like some of the bigger ones in other places I've lived.) I read constantly. I made friends at my earliest jobs because I was always sitting in the breakroom or office with a book. I spent lunch, breaks between classes, all my free time at home reading. Then I kind of overdosed on all the assigned reading, books that didn't interest me, in high school and college and lost touch with why I loved to read to begin with. And it's only recently that I've rediscovered it.

Part of why I got back into reading was because I told myself that if I want to write, I need to read. Especially once I started writing young adult and realized I was completely out of touch with what was being published in young adult fiction. And lately I'm just craving a book to read. I've read four books in the last month -- which, given that I have a full-time day job and spend a lot of my time researching, reading blogs, looking at agents, and writing -- is an accomplishment for me.

I started reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone a couple weeks ago. I've seen a couple of the movies but until I rediscovered why I love to read I had no interest in reading the books. Just didn't, for whatever reason. And it's not that I'm not into fantasy because I am. I grew up on Star Wars (call it what you want but I consider it a mix of sci fi and fantasy with a little bit of every other genre thrown in). I adore The Lord of the Rings films (though I have not yet read the books) and I love the thought of magic and witches and wizards and all that stuff. One of my dreams is to write an epic fantasy and I have all these ideas dancing in my head, though I don't feel I'm accomplished enough as a writer in general (and by accomplished I don't mean published; I just mean experienced enough with creating scenes and situations and characters of my own) to attempt it.

Okay, that was a massive tangent. The point I was heading towards was that, as I read the first few chapters of Sorcerer's Stone, I couldn't help but zone in on all the instances of passive voice, the list-like descriptions of characters, etc., in the book. Writing my own work has affected how I read. And even though, as a writer now, I feel like I'm much more forgiving of typos and little errors here and there (even though I'm still in the writing phase I feel like I have a fair grasp of what actually goes into getting a book on the shelves), I notice all these things more.

Not to say Rowling's writing is bad or anything. Her ability to tell a story, to create this world, astounds me. But the things that we, as novice writers, are told to avoid just jump off the page at me now. It makes me wonder what I'm going to notice when I sit down to edit my first draft. (Yikes!)