Would that reading the diaries and letters of writers were a pleasurable experience and I could consider it a guilty pleasure; it is guilt-ridden, to be sure, but rarely do I find it fun.  It seems voyeuristic in the most repulsive of ways, and I only justify it through the promise to myself that, somehow, I am benefitting from it, that it is more than just salacious meat to my famished, base curiosity.  As a resource for discovering new writers and artists, in particular, the otherwise untoward collections that publish the letters and diaries of artists – and the close and unintended contact they offer – often yield a wealth of tremendous literary guidance.

Some make this hand-wringing validation easier than others.  Two recent releases this represent fairly well: Samuel Beckett's letters – written between 1929 and 1940 - occupy something closer to the "scholarship" realm of this dirty business of letter-reading, while Reborn, a collection of Susan Sontag's early diary entries, lies firmly in the less defensible camp.  Both, however, may pass themselves more respectably off simply as guides to the quotidian literary preoccupations of their writers: it is through Beckett's restive, poignant letters that I discovered Robert Burton's extraordinary The Anatomy of Melancholy, while Sontag's diaries – the contents of which are embarrassing and shameful in many ways, most notably in the fact that they were ever published and, more personally, that I would ever succumb to reading something never intended for such public consumption – have since led me to a tremendous variety of other writers, to say nothing of filmmakers and musicians.

Robert Lowell's letters – published in many editions – represent both ends of this spectrum, the "sacred" – that would be, I suppose, the "intellectual" or "literary" – and the "profane": that is, the more personal, the now-very-queasily-public.  But in his letters one may find a tremendous resource for choosing a next book – or a next dozen or so – to read.  A Wild Perfection, a collection of letters by James Wright, errs far more comfortably on the "sacred" side, and its editors were quite evidently concerned with presenting a work more scholarly than scandalous; the result is wonderful.  For having read James Joyce's letters, on the other hand, I must plead for absolution.

If anyone has read any letters or diaries by writers whom they admire - or don't, for that matter - which have in turn directed them to the work of others, I would love to know.