How many books should writers read?
It is well known that the postmodern novels often use citations and references to other cultural objects, first of all to the other novels. Sometimes it is necessary to read several of them in order to understand the majority of senses in a particular chapter.
How do you think how many books should the postmodern author read and how culturally spacious his mind should be in order to write state of the art literature?
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There is no postmodern canon that you have to work through to be able to participate in postmodern intellectual and artistic discourse. If you want to create postmodern art (which is always at the same time theory) then that desire will drive you to follow the intertextual references in the texts you read. For a postmodern author, there is no end to the web of references, so there is no end to what you might read, except your own disinterest.
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Quite honestly, if you do not read widely and voraciously, you have no business trying to be a writer. To do otherwise would be like a chef who only ate once a week and only at McDonald's. It would be like a actor who hardly went to the theater or a ball player who never went to a ball game.
And I do want to stress widely here. There seem to be many people who only every read in one narrow genre and expect to be able to write in that genre. I don't think that is going to work. You need a wider view in order to understand what writing is. And if you had the kind of love of stories and the kind of love of language that it takes to be a writer, you would never be content to confine your reading to a single genre.
Now as to the amount of preening erudition a post-modern author is expected to do to be accepted in the post-modern author's club, I can't really say. Probably a lot. Post modernism is a conceit, and I suppose that conceitedness is essential to produce it, but I suspect that if that conceit does not come naturally to you, it is probably impossible to fake it.
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