Braddy Reads... Like a Writer

Every now and again, I feel a tinge of guilt that I did NOT actually read all of the texts I was assigned to read back in college. I still wound up reading approximately 36 books a semester, though, so I don't usually feel all THAT guilty. Still, I like to go back sometimes and read some of the books I was assigned in school but never actually got around to.

I just finished Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer, which was an assigned text for one of the many, many creative writing courses I took. Prose's thesis is that a writer learns best how to write not through the workshop method so popular these days (and ironically the method that made up the very class wherein I received this book) but through methodical study of the writing styles of the masters of the past.

To get her point across, Prose includes vast excerpts from novels and short stories of the past 200 years, which she then meticulously breaks down to analyze why the writing is so good. She makes her point pretty well, but... well, she doesn't do much to prove her OWN writing talent. I'll just say it's gotta be nice to put a book out there that's only 50% what you wrote yourself.

I kid. Prose's writing is just fine. In fact, she concludes her analysis of some lengthy Chekhov passages with a passionate little appeal that may well become a mantra of sorts for me:

Come back! I've made a mistake. Forget observation, consciousness, clear-sightedness. Forget about life. Read Chekhov, read the stories straight through. Admit that you understand nothing of life, nothing of what you see. Then go out and look at the world.

Still, Prose's purpose in writing her book is to... convince people to go and read OTHER books. And... well, she was successful. I've compiled a list of books Prose recommends EVERYONE read that I'll personally be hunting down to read for myself - and hopefully fill in some gaps in that English major education of mine.

Here's the short list (in no real order):

• Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Philip Roth, American Pastoral
• Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
• Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
• Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From: Selected Stories
• Paula Fox, Desperate Characters
• Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
• Richard Price, Freedomland
• Stuart Dybek, I Sailed with Magellan
• Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O-
• Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (shut up)
• George Eliot, Middlemarch
• Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental Education
• Henry Green, Doting and Loving
• Scott Spencer, A Ship Made of Paper
• Joy Williams, Escapes
• Harold Brodkey, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode
• Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis and Other Stories
• Anton Chekhov, Tales of Anton Chekhov
• Ivan Turgenev, First Love
• Samuel Beckett, The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989
• Juan Rulfo, Pedro Paramo

And, yes, that's actually the SHORT list.

Now I guess it's on to the next book - cuz this list might take a while.