You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thanks to sites like Goodreads and Amazon, there's a seemingly endless supply of books at our fingertips, and sometimes it feels like all the other readers out there are devouring books faster than we are. It's easy to feel a pressure to read a large number of currently popular books in as little time as possible. Francine Prose, however, argues that taking the opposite approach is what makes reading most worthwhile: read the classics, read them slowly, and think about why each word is there. Only then do we have a chance of understanding why the author put one word after another in a certain way, and why these words affect us when we read them. This understanding can help inform and inspire our own ways of looking at the world and telling stories.

I learned a lot from the many examples that Prose highlights in the book, each showing a different facet of storytelling. Often, these examples show that it's ok to go against popular dogma, like "Show, don't tell", and the idea that dialog must not be written like actual speech. The chapters that especially stuck with me were the ones about narration, details, dialog, and gesture. Prose reveals the process of careful reading as a kind of detective work, with many clues and secrets lurking just below the surface, waiting to be uncovered by the reader. The downside of having so many examples is that it take energy to reorient oneself every time a new excerpt is entered, and much of Prose's writing is spent on explaining the context of the next passage that is about to be jumped into. For this reason, the book is occasionally a wearying read, and less informative than it could be.

Of course, the examples in this book are shaped by Prose's own tastes, which is natural. What seems less natural is the apparent snobbery with which she mentions, for example, science fiction. I'm not necessarily going to drop everything and embark on her list of "Books to be read immediately", but I'm certainly motivated to read a number of them and, just as importantly, I think that what I learned from this book will be applicable to anything I read.

[Read for the Read Harder Challenge: a self-improvement book.]

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