Reading Like a Writer (2006)

As a general rule I try to avoid self-help books of all kinds, especially for writers, although the latter can be shiny distracting objects that I find coming home with me from bookstores. This one is a little different in that it's actually more of a self-help book for readers than for writers and that's something I can get behind. I haven't read a lot of Prose's fiction—I'm afraid I find it in the vein of too much MFA fiction—but she is really in a comfort zone when she talks about reading, breaking it down first by "Words," "Sentences," and "Paragraphs"—and even they follow "Close Reading," the first chapter and essentially the statement of purpose, which may contain the single most useful prescriptive strategy for reading I know: "[Begin] at the beginning," she counsels, "lingering over every word, every phrase, every image, considering how it enhance[s] and contribute[s] to the story as a whole." That's her approach to teaching (and she says she and a class can get through up to 10 pages of a narrative in a day), but it's also her approach to reading—and mine too now, within the limits of my patience (which, alas). This is when reading can become the most rewarding—going slow, slow, slow. It reminds me of the old piece of advice about the best way to understand a poem: memorize it. Then it is in your head and accessible to ruminating thought and connection. I like Prose's taste too, also presented as a quick list in that first chapter: "Chekhov, Joyce, Austen, George Eliot, Kafka, Tolstoy, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Nabokov, Heinrich von Kleist, Raymond Carver, Jane Bowles, James Baldwin, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant." Lots of usual suspects there, but also plenty of new directions to go as well, and more within the book, which is packed with great examples and great writing. In fact, the section at the end she calls "Books to Be Read Immediately" (there is no list of books to be read later) has made itself one of those go-to lists I like to keep around and consult frequently—among other things it has already brought me back to Jane Austen, and turned me on to Flannery O'Connor and Paul Bowles. In terms of teaching writing, the ostensible end to this, it's about choosing the apt role model; for better or worse, it's always been my own instinctive approach to learning writing. But Prose's book accelerated that for me remarkably, offering fresh new ways into the pleasures and utility of reading, not only by the examples she chooses but also by the way she models her own process. She is a lucent writer and I learned a lot from reading this.

In case it's not at the library.