Name: Trevor Berrett's review of Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
Item: Reading Like a Writer
Rating: 3
Author: Trevor Berrett

Francine Prose

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 in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield 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.

A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them

Reading Like a Writer

Rebecca Owen

Trevor Berrett

This was a fun book. It was enjoyable to scrutinize some of the best writers for their technique. That said, I usually wanted more--I just didn't feel like I was learning that much, more just remembering. This book does not examine works in too much depth. But it does not set out to. It's meant to show readers how they can enjoy reading that much more by paying attention to the technique and skill of the writer--sentences, paragraphs, use of dialogue and gesture, etc. It also shows how reading this way can help one progress in one's own writing. No, it does not dig deeply. But it does provide a taste, and that taste is enough to make one read closer.

Rebecca Owen &
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

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Rebecca Owen &Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose

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Rebecca Owen &
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose