All in all, this book just made me feel excited to read more, and made me feel equipped to appreciate what I read more deeply. I appreciated Prose's distaste for universal rules and principles, and her "show don't tell" method of demonstrating what makes for good writing. Reading Like a Writer is a quite enjoyable read, chock full of good advice and even better examples. I disagreed with some of her analyses, but I really enjoyed the book, and highly recommend it to readers and writers alike. 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 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.
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.
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.
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