Ratings22
Average rating3.7
In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and tricks of the masters to discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humour and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart – to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; to look to John le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O’Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail; to be inspired by Emily Brontë’s structural nuance and Charles Dickens’s deceptively simple narrative techniques. Most importantly, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted, and reminds us that good writing comes out of good reading.
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.
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