Reading Like a Writer
Ratings8
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings8
Average rating3.7
Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.
In *Reading Like a Writer*, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—[Dostoyevsky][1], [Flaubert][2], [Kafka][3], [Austen][4], [Dickens][5], [Woolf][6], [Chekhov][7]—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of [Philip Roth][8] and the breathtaking paragraphs of [Isaac Babel][9]; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in [George Eliot][10]'s [Middlemarch][11]. She looks to [John Le Carre][12] for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to [Flannery O'Connor][13] for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to [James Joyce][14] and [Katherine Mansfield][15] for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted.
Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, *Reading Like a Writer* will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
[1]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL22242A/
[2]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL79039A/
[3]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL33146A/
[4]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL21594A/
[5]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL24638A/
[6]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL19450A/
[7]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL3156833A/
[8]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL4327308A/
[9]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2657666A/
[10]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL24528A/
[11]: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL20937W/
[12]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL2101074A/
[13]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL35145A/
[14]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL31827A/
[15]: http://openlibrary.org/authors/OL65682A/
Reviews with the most likes.
Not the most relaxing read but worth it to appreciate the beauty of language and the weight of every single word in a piece of literature. She includes a reading list (“Books To Read Immediately”), from which I confess I've only read 5%. There are plenty of extracts from literary classics to illustrate what good writing is. And she makes me want to read Chekhov.
A book that merits a second, even a third, reading.
Prose shows us all her favorite passages from a lifetime of good reading. It was a lovely trip and it took me places I would not have thought to go. I especially liked Prose's thoughts on writing, how good writing often breaks the conventional rules of good writing.
Beautifully written with lots of great passages from various works of great literature. Lesson seems to be to read great work, read closely, and that God is in the details. I confess, though, I didn't come away as energized and inspired as I had hoped but some great tidbits.
