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I don't know, I thought this had a pretty pretentious voice to it. It was okay, but just made me want to read the books she's talking about, I didn't get a lot out of her commentary frankly... |
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Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Wa... by Francine Prose
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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, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure ... read more
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This book turned me on to some writers with whom I was not familiar, and really emphasized the importance of close reading to truly appreciate great writing. However, her quote-and-explicate, quote-and-explicate motif got repetitious and tedious after a while. Still, it's probably a useful book for budding writers. |
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Wow. What a waste of time! This book has 3, maybe 4 great chapters. It starts off really strong by emphasizing the need to read slowly, to soak up each word, sentence, and paragraph and let it ruminate in your mind to get the full impact of what the author intended. It stresses the importance of word choice, purposeful sentence structure and style, and paragraph organization. The other chapters dive into characters, dialog, details, and gesture. Prose has some good ideas and fantastic examples, but the problem lies in the fact that there are six or seven examples for every point she makes. If you are new to studying the craft of writing, this would probably be beneficial. But after a few examples, you can jump ahead to the next chapter. All in all, there is nothing earth shattering about this book, and by the end, I actually wanted to throw it away. |
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Not a book on how to write, but on how to read any great book as instruction itself in how to write. Prose refers to a great many books I haven't read yet, but this isn't a problem because her comments are limited to the excerpt she provides and spoilers are few (the biggest being a giveaway of the ending of Anna Karenina--bummer). |
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