Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for those Who Love Books and those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose (2007, 275 pages)

IIf your first thought on realizing you have a three day weekend coming soon is to plan your reading, 

then you might be living The Reading Life.

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose is a delightful book about how novels  and stories work 

their magic, about what distinguishes predestarian work from sublime art.  In addition to being full of great advise to neophyte fiction authors it is a wonderful study in close reading.  This book will for sure make most people who take it seriously better readers and it might  help even book bloggers to write in a less clumsy fashion.   Francine Prose loves literature and this come shining through. 

Prose has drawn on her extensive pedagogical experience in creative writing to deal with some of the basic challenges faced by writers.  She talks about her class room experiences in several great segments.  There are chapters devoted to word choice, to sentence structure, to narration, to dialogue among others.  Prose makes her point through close analyses of passages, some several pages long, from famous writers.  I loved her quoted selections and found her close readings very illuminating. 

Her biggest advise to writers is to read the greats and try to understand their artistry.  She devoted one chapter to "Lessons We Can Learn from Chekhov" which will get me reading him again soon, I hope.

This is not  a text book like work but more a conversation.  Prose lets us see how her love of reading, I was so happy when she cited Samuel Johnson as perhaps the greatest of close readers, has impacted her life.  Reading the short stories of Chekhov helped her get through a dark period.  

This is a very interesting highly informative book I endorse without reservation to all who fit the title description.

At the end of the work she lists several pages of books she says must be read by aspiring writers as soon as possible.  Great list.

Official Biography

Francine Prose is the author of twenty works of fiction. Her novel A Changed Man won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and Blue Angel was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent works of nonfiction include the highly acclaimed Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer. The recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director's Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Prose is a former president of PEN American Center, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in New York City.

I have just started her latest novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris, 1932 to see how she puts her ides into practice.  

Mel u