Reading Like A Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them (Harper Perennial) by Francine Prose is both an instructional handbook and a collection of meditations on the pleasures of entering other worlds through a book’s pages. Each chapter examines a discrete component of written works—words, sentences, paragraphs, characters, narrators—and includes examples of exemplary writing from the canon of greats: Chekov, Márquez, Gallant, Hemingway, Munro, Stein and many others, and from the first page, the author’s devotion to books is infectious (Prose includes a recommended reading list titled “Books to Be Read Immediately”). Many of the excerpts are chosen to illustrate “the rules” of good writing and how they are best manipulated to enable readers to become immersed in the fictional world of a book, but Prose pays equal respect to those writers who break the rules. She invites the reader to familiarize herself with the conventions of good writing, to observe them in action, and to cast them aside in favour of what sounds good in the mind’s ear—an indispensable lesson for anyone living the writing life.
