Francine Prose's book is a great guidebook for the literary tourist, a thorough and engaging reminder to actually look at the ways in which what you're reading has been constructed - to look at each word, sentence, and paragraph so as to understand what is and isn't said, what it tells you, and why. Along the way, she introduces you to countless authors you have and haven't heard of, giving you just enough of a taste that you want to read them all. (Well. I don't want to read Pynchon or Flaubert or Nabokov again, but I can see where you'd feel like you might.)

She addresses, sort of obliquely, the question of whether writing workshops and classes are "worth it" and whether there are rules of construction that can be taught or imparted or imbibed, and comes to the conclusion that the rules are really more like guidelines, and that there as many good reasons to break the rules as to follow them.

The examples in the text form the basis of a great reading list, and following the book is a list - containing some books from which Prose has taken examples, and others that she has not - which is also excellent. She has a definite taste for the old masters, and for Russian lit, but more importantly she has excellent taste in literature, and an excellent eye for how writers do what they do. I disagreed with some of her analyses, but I really enjoyed the book, and highly recommend it to readers and writers alike. ( )

This is a wonderful book. Ms. Prose, an aptly named writer, writing/lit instructor and critic, shares some of her favorite passages from novels and stories to highlight techniques for using words, narrative, character, gesture etc. And she's not shy about her worship of Chekhov (guess I should read him). Very enjoyable to read, it provides great information without being the least bit pedantic or boring. She even provides a list of "Books to Be Read Immediately," from which many of the passages are taken. This is a woman who is truly in love with fiction. I'll be referring back to this often. ( )

Prose belongs to the "Let's read closely and examine the writer's word choices, not his/her politics/biography/ideology." So I'm reading to see how the other half thinks. And to ge any help I can with my writing! ( )

I picked up this book because the book's title describes one of my life's goals: to write a book someday (hopefully). I still don't think I'm ready to reach that goal, but this book helped me to start reading books in a different light.

Sometimes I think I am the world's worst reader of literature. I tend to read everything literally rather than think of any themes, metaphors or analogies. I enjoy reading for plot, characters, dialogue but skip over the construction of the writing, what the author is trying to say by how they construct their prose. Francine Prose's book tries to teach someone like me, to read between the lines, and to analyze what makes great writing, great.

Prose argues that one does not need classes or "how-to" books to learn how to write. She advocates that the best lesson for writing is close reading the work of great writers. Reading like a Writer basically excerpts famous works, and then Prose discusses how each passage shows great technique to construct sentences, character, tone, narration, dialogue, gestures, etc. Prose even includes a chapter on Checkov to show how he "breaks" all the previous rules.

As a result of my background, I sometimes found it tough to do the close reading. I am a fast reader and tend to race through books to "find out what happens next". But for once, I really took my time to go through the passages and I do think it's influenced how I read. I'll admit, I still don't understand some of the points Prose tries to make (especially the paragraph section), but I feel I'm closer to understanding than I was before. Maybe I'm just thanking my lucky stars that someone actually tried to explain close reading; all my English lit classes all the way into University never did (and I did well in them!)

Reading like a Writer was a NYTimes Bestseller, and it's easy to see why. Prose has a love of books and the written language, and her writing is very accessible. The passages she chose were from a very diverse group of writers and she even includes a list of "Books to be Read Immediately" that I will try to make a must-read for me in the next few years. Definitely Recommended. ( )

Most "how-to-write" books fall into one of two categories; either they are a textbook style list of writing exercises or the emphasize the creativity aspect and suggest things like dream journals. This book, thankfully, falls in neither category.

Francine Prose uses this book to show and not tell us what good writing is. She divides the chapters into aspects of writing like sentences and paragraph breaks, but the real joy of this book are the fragments of novels liberally sprinkled through each chapter. From Scott Spencer to Gustave Flaubert and an especially liberal helping of Chekov, Prose gives example after example of what constitutes good writing.

I found this book more inspiring and helpful than any other book on creative writing I've read since Stephen King's "On Writing". ( )