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sarahetc's review against another edition
4.0
This was mostly delightful. I ended up skipping quite a bit, including the entire chapter on Chekov, mostly because of a vague and probably dumb desire to avoid spoilers. It's really interesting how she builds the instruction/colloquy from words to sentences to paragraphs to dialogue to description/gesture. My brain tingled moving from sentences to paragraphs, because I was for sure she was going to write about Nabakov and Kerouac and I would do a teeny little in-bed-in-my-nightgown-eating-ice-and-chocolate boogie to read someone else love them as much as me. Nabakov, yes. Light of my life, fire of my loins. There is just NOTHING out there like him. Kerouac, no. I held out hope to the very end of the book. But I guess if you're as into Chekov and Kafka as Prose is, Kerouac is probably not your jam. I'll write my own version and dedicate it to her, called Reading Like a Freaky Beatnik: A Guide for People Who Read More American Literature than Russian. Then we will have coffee and be besties and she will help me write a novel. BRB gonna go get on this plan.
brandifox's review against another edition
the premise of close reading as a tool for writing well, solid, but on the whole I didn’t love it.
“What think you of books?” said he, smiling.
“Books-oh! no. I am sure we never read the same, or not with the same feelings.”
pariahpants's review against another edition
1.0
The title of this book caught my interest, but unfortunately I can not figure out how this became the title of the book. I feel like Francine Prose missed her mark. Or maybe I just expected something different. She could have called this book "I like long-winded old timey writing, and so should you." All of her examples were out-dated, antiquated, and out of reach. It seemed like they all came straight out of the canon or were at least cut from the same cloth.
Nothing of a modern writing style was really mentioned, but she did mention rules such as 'never have a one sentence paragraph' and the first thing I though of was 'yeah, that never works.' Fight Club and The Book Thief were both successful books, and more importantly, great books, that broke that rule over and over and over again. But there is no mention of this sort of modern exception in Reading Like A Writer. No mention of anything modern at all...
Francine Prose's writing style is also disappointing. (I've never read her novels, so this is just about this one non-fiction book) She comes across as arrogant and condescending. It was painful to get through the book, really. There were chapters where suddenly it seemed like she was picking random large and obscure words out of a dictionary and just throwing them in. The writing would be normal for 20 pages, then suddenly there would be 10 pages splattered with words that just seemed so unnatural and clumsy, but they were tucked in to show what an amazing vocabulary she possesses.
All this said, I think my biggest complaint was the whole book, even though divided into a few separate sections such as Words, Narration, and Paragraphs, was pretty much the same. It was her giving quotes of what is obviously her favorite books or moments in books and then just going through them. She would quote some dialog. Then she would explain things that happened before and after the dialog and make a couple of comments, and then she would fill in the blanks about what was about to happen. It felt more like she just wanted to talk about her favorite excerpts from classic literature. I don't feel like I learned much about actually 'reading like a writer.'
Just a side note: I have nothing wrong with old books. I've read the Russians and the Old Englishmen. I've read Pynchon and Doestoevsky and Tolstoy and Austen. I've enjoyed a lot of those old books. I just felt like all of her examples came from this one style of writing, and it cut a whole lot out that I felt should have and could have been addressed.
Nothing of a modern writing style was really mentioned, but she did mention rules such as 'never have a one sentence paragraph' and the first thing I though of was 'yeah, that never works.' Fight Club and The Book Thief were both successful books, and more importantly, great books, that broke that rule over and over and over again. But there is no mention of this sort of modern exception in Reading Like A Writer. No mention of anything modern at all...
Francine Prose's writing style is also disappointing. (I've never read her novels, so this is just about this one non-fiction book) She comes across as arrogant and condescending. It was painful to get through the book, really. There were chapters where suddenly it seemed like she was picking random large and obscure words out of a dictionary and just throwing them in. The writing would be normal for 20 pages, then suddenly there would be 10 pages splattered with words that just seemed so unnatural and clumsy, but they were tucked in to show what an amazing vocabulary she possesses.
All this said, I think my biggest complaint was the whole book, even though divided into a few separate sections such as Words, Narration, and Paragraphs, was pretty much the same. It was her giving quotes of what is obviously her favorite books or moments in books and then just going through them. She would quote some dialog. Then she would explain things that happened before and after the dialog and make a couple of comments, and then she would fill in the blanks about what was about to happen. It felt more like she just wanted to talk about her favorite excerpts from classic literature. I don't feel like I learned much about actually 'reading like a writer.'
Just a side note: I have nothing wrong with old books. I've read the Russians and the Old Englishmen. I've read Pynchon and Doestoevsky and Tolstoy and Austen. I've enjoyed a lot of those old books. I just felt like all of her examples came from this one style of writing, and it cut a whole lot out that I felt should have and could have been addressed.
rogermckenzie's review against another edition
3.0
Found this book difficult to engage with. Although the author is obviously very knowledgeable about her craft I never really felt any kind of attachment or relationship to her - something I have enjoyed with all my best teachers. A very informative book that may be just what's needed by a different reader to me.
shannonscotteditorauthor's review against another edition
2.0
Sweet. Gaia. If you looked up "pretentious" in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Francine Prose's picture would be the visual example. When she wasn't spending three pages quoting excerpts, and when she wasn't then spending ten pages hyperanalyzing said excerpts, she was up on her soapbox crying into the wind about how much better "classic" literature is over any genre fiction EVER and "classic" literature authors are the only authors EVER to understand how to most efficiently use storytelling techniques.
Page 15: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seek to indicate where your own work should be heading."
Page 93: "Though students of writing are usually instructed [...] that it is necessary to pick a point of view and stick to it, this, like any "rule," can be circumvented by any writer skillful enough to get away with it."
Page 244 [quote from Anton Chekov]: "Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth—unconditional and honest."
I could literally go on and on. There are some gems of advice in the book, but clearly "guide" is a misnomer. There's very little actionable intelligence provided. Instead, Prose spends 97% of the book preaching from her pulpit of Literary Fiction Expertise.
Page 15: "You will do yourself a disservice if you confine your reading to the rising star whose six-figure, two-book contract might seek to indicate where your own work should be heading."
Page 93: "Though students of writing are usually instructed [...] that it is necessary to pick a point of view and stick to it, this, like any "rule," can be circumvented by any writer skillful enough to get away with it."
Page 244 [quote from Anton Chekov]: "Artistic literature is called so because it depicts life as it really is. Its aim is truth—unconditional and honest."
I could literally go on and on. There are some gems of advice in the book, but clearly "guide" is a misnomer. There's very little actionable intelligence provided. Instead, Prose spends 97% of the book preaching from her pulpit of Literary Fiction Expertise.
markdudley's review against another edition
5.0
Absolutely wonderful advice for writers. And readers who want to appreciate the writing as much as the plot.
mms19's review against another edition
4.0
An accomplished writer’s advice on what makes for good fiction, all told through her acute readings of authors she finds — and persuasively demonstrates are — exemplary. Worth the read to become a better reader. Worth the read for her list of exemplars. Worth the read to daydream about a college life that included taking a fiction writing class, her fiction writing class.