Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose: Book Review

reading like a writer by francine prose cover

I didn’t necessarily agree with all that this book had to say, but I did find it a valuable read. It focuses almost exclusively on literary fiction, which I admit I don’t care for much.

It was also rather interesting to see that in this non-fiction book that really focuses on what a great writer is, the author ends plenty of sentences with prepositions. While I wouldn’t really ever criticize this in fiction, it makes it hard to take a person who is trying to sound knowledgeable about (and teach about) the English language seriously.

There were definitely useful pieces of information in this book. I (and other authors of genre fiction) may benefit more, however, from something like Stephen King’s On Writing. – Anne ⭐️⭐️


 

There is value in this book. I can say that much.

I felt like the majority of the book is aimed at mainly praising aspects of literary fiction – which is not a category I feel my own writing falls into, necessarily.

Reading this book certainly brought my back to my university days and my literature classes. It’s a a book that will make you think and ponder.

I do believe that there are nuggets of good advice in this book. Some of the anecdotes I found amusing and interesting!

There are also entire chapters which I completely disagree with, the sections on character and dialogue chief among them. That being said, I still think that in general, there are useful bits of advice in this book and certainly plenty of concepts to consider. – Jake ⭐️⭐️

One thought on “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose: Book Review

  1. Hm. A lot of books that write about writing are taken up with literary fiction – as are a fair number of Creative Writing classes. Like you, I write a different genre and don’t necessarily want to find myself wading through conventions that don’t apply to my particularly corner of the writing world…

    Liked by 1 person

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