I’ve Been Reading: Reading Like a Writer
Most writers were heavy readers first; most heavy readers eventually try their hand at writing. Some successful writers pick up their trade through osmosis, but most need to carefully study their predecessors, to parse their work and identify precisely how they pulled it off. Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer explains (largely by example) how to be a close reader, mostly with the aim of instructing would-be writers in how to model their own prose. She begins, appropriately, with words, moves onto sentences and then paragraphs; after examining the basic components of text itself, she discusses the larger elements of fiction writing. She also includes an entire chapter raving about Chekhov, simply because she’s totally nuts for him. Nothing wrong with that.
Prose loves reading, and this book makes you want to read, even if her devotion to meticulous close reading makes the entire endeavor seem as exhausting as it is exhaustive. Personally, I am not a close reader. I am a frantic reader. While I appreciate Prose’s call to read less and better, I can’t get over feeling like I’m racing the clock. There are only so many books you can get through in a lifetime, and there are an infinite number of books I really want to read. Since graduating from college, I have never once reread a book, which is, of course, a shame. If anyone should feel at leisure to read closely and carefully, it would be me, as I currently have nothing but free time, but still, I read quickly, in gulps. Which, incidentally, is the best way to read non-fiction (or at least, to read non-fiction for informational purposes).
But fiction is about the read itself. Prose says, of reading Chekhov on a long daily bus commute during a particularly dismal period of her life:
Reading Chekhov, I felt not happy, exactly, but as close to happiness as I was likely to come. And it occurred to me that this was the pleasure and mystery of reading, as well as the answer to those who say that books will disappear. For now, books are still the best way of taking great art and its consolations along with us on the bus.
