Reading Like a Writer

Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer is billed as “a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them.” I think Prose does have some good advice for writers in the book, but more than that, this book is, as the blurb from USA Today indicates, “A Love letter to the pleasures of reading.” Prose points to excellent examples of dialogue and characterization. She favors a close reading approach to reading and enjoying literature.

Prose insists, rightly, that if you want to write, you need to be a reader, and she notes that it’s astonishingly true that many young writers are not reading. I have to admit I agree with Prose. I don’t understand why someone who wants to write wouldn’t be reading just about everything. Reading is a proper writer’s education. It was reading other books that made me think I could try to write them, and I just can’t imagine writing without reading.

In the interview at the end of the book, Prose notes, “One of the sad things that I think partly accounts for the decline of the audience for reading and books is that people aren’t being encouraged to read for pleasure” (8). Of book clubs, she says that “[T]hey do get people reading and talking about reading. But on the other hand, when you’re reading for a book club, the whole time you’re thinking, I have to have an opinion and I’m going to have to defend it to these people. The whole notion of being swept away by a book pretty much goes out the window” (8). I think she makes some valid points. I have a lot of students who are not readers. I have some students who become readers (and sometimes, you’d be surprised how little encouragement is needed). The key is that students are choosing to read for pleasure. That’s not to say I think we should do away with required reading. I happen to think sometimes, some real good comes from being required to read a book. Many of my students this year told me they were not looking forward to Frankenstein, but after they read it, they really liked it. Would they ever have picked it up on their own? Maybe not. I know I enjoyed some of the reading I was required to do in school (not all of it, surely). We can pull out the old saw about everything that is competing with reading nowadays, but I think that we have always had readers and nonreaders, even when there wasn’t as much to compete with. Prose thinks that the problem with required reading is often that “[T]eachers are teaching books that they themselves find boring to students who are bored by them. And they’re teaching them in a way that bores the students” (8-9). There’s some unfortunate truth to this observation. In some cases, curricula are so set in stone that teachers have no options about which books they teach. One fortunate aspect of my own teaching position is that I can select all the books my students will study. If teachers are allowed to select books they are passionate about, sometimes that passion transfers to the students. I’m not going to say they’ll always like required reading, but students are more apt to like required reading that the teacher so clearly enjoys.

One very interesting chapter in this book, “Learning from Chekhov,” examines the rules and advice writing teachers give students. Prose notes for each time she has told a student not to do something with writing, she finds an example in Chekhov where it works. I thought that chapter was interesting because it essentially says that the most important rule to know about writing is that there are no rules. It’s a somewhat frightening and liberating idea. What we can do (and should do, in Prose’s view) is use the masters as models.

Prose has some eclectic tastes in literature, and she mentioned a great many books I’d not heard of, much less read. She includes a list of recommended books that includes many of the greats of the Western canon in addition to some surprising choices I wouldn’t necessarily have thought would be on such a list. Examples include mainstays like Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights, The Great Gatsby, and Moby Dick, but some interesting choices include Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. I had never heard of this novel, and thus it wouldn’t have been the usual choice for a Dickens novel, I should think. Prose is fond of the Russians, a proclivity that shines through almost every page of this book. I do find it helpful that Prose recommends certain translators for literature that isn’t written in English. It can be daunting to select which version to read when a book has been translated multiple times, and a little guidance is helpful.

I think people who truly love books and reading (especially English majors who live for this sort of thing) will enjoy Prose’s book, but I’m not sure it would be of any help to students who are trying to learn about literature or writing. Instead, I would recommend Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor or How to Read Novels Like a Professor.

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The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the MadmanMy British literature students are (I hope they are, at any rate) reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary as part of their summer reading assignment.  If they enjoy it half as much as I did, I will consider it a great success.  The story is enthralling.  Winchester examines the relationship between Dr. W. C. Minor, an American Civil War veteran who was committed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum after murdering a man in the street, and James Murray, for many years the chief editor of the OED.

When Murray took the helm at the OED, he solicited help from volunteers who might we willing to look up what he called “catchwords” in their reading and copy quotations.  The OED wanted to include quotations to illustrate each word’s use and also to trace the words back to their earliest uses.  Considering the seeming disorganization of the affair (to modern eyes) and the unclear instructions volunteers were given, you, like me, will probably marvel that the volunteers were ever any use at all.

Winchester does not flinch from honesty with regard to Dr. Minor’s crime, but he also manages to portray him in a sympathetic light, and I found myself feeling he had, in some measure, been redeemed even if his mind was never to give him any peace.

I highly recommend this book to students of the English language, word lovers (this book is essential for word lovers — those children who used to haul out the dictionary at home and just look up words), history buffs, and anyone who just loves a good yarn.

For my next book, I will return to the Historical Fiction Challenge and read Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.  If you have followed my progress with Emma in the sidebar under DailyLit, you may notice I will be finishing that book in less than a week’s time.  I haven’t decided which DailyLit selection I’ll read next.

The World is Flat

The World is FlatI found Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat to be an intriguing book. Friedman’s thesis is that a series of “flatteners,” or world-changing events, converged at just the right time to make the world’s playing field level and allow countries such as India and China opportunities to compete with America and Europe. Largely, I saw very little in Friedman’s book to disagree with. He acknowledges that the same tools we use for good in this new and increasingly global economy can be used for evil. He references terrorists and has interesting insights into their motivation for destruction and the reasons for their hate. I do think Friedman’s view of what will happen as the world becomes increasingly flat, to use his term, is optimistic, but frankly, I think a lot of it would be good for us. I think Friedman somewhat dismisses the plight of American workers who lose their jobs to outsourcing, but he has a good solution — we need to learn to adapt and to make ourselves special so we are more attractive job candidates. I think that solution is more realistic than the one that seems to be favored by many others — punish companies who outsource and try to force companies into doing business the way they did in the past. Life goes on, and things change. We have to change with them, or we will be left behind.

I think one of the biggest favors we can do ourselves is invest in green technology. We are way too dependent on foreign oil. Oil is a stick that countries we otherwise would have hardly any trade relations with use against us. Their economies are dependent on oil, and when it runs out, they’re going to be in serious trouble.

I am really excited about the potential for collaboration that exists. I love it that we can work together across miles. Through this blog I have made friends from all over America and a few in other countries. We’d never have “met” if not for flat world technologies like blogs. I have learned so much from technology and have developed so much passion for Web 2.0 ideas — which are nothing more than flattening agents online — that I am pursuing my masters degree — online — in Instructional Technology beginning this fall.

I also like the idea that businesses have to be transparent. Your reputation is important, and you can no longer manage it completely. If someone isn’t happy with your goods or services, they can complain in a blog or forum, and you might lose customers. I recently complained about the spurious business practices of Urban Posters, and I had lots of feedback from other customers who were treated the same way, in addition to a hollow apology that blamed the credit card processing company from an Urban Posters representative. People were angry about their money being taken, and they said so in a public forum. Now when someone searches for information about this company, this negative feedback will perhaps prevent someone else from being taken in. I think that’s a fantastic thing to come out of the flat world.

This book is an investment. It’s long, and I think it requires a lot of reflection and thinking on the part of the reader. If you are interested in a beach book or a quick read, this book is not what you’re looking for; however, if you are interested in the times in which we live and emerging ideas and technology, this book will fascinate you.

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A Room of One’s Own

A Room of One's OwnWhat might women writers accomplish, given the freedom to create enjoyed by men? Virginia Woolf’s thesis in her classic A Room of One’s Own is that if women were given £500 a year and a room of their own, they might then be able to reach the genius previously the purview of men alone.

As I read this essay, I mostly felt disgust and anger. In many ways, women are still second-class citizens, and what’s worse is the acceptance of this status. When I was considering careers for myself, I didn’t think about traditionally male careers such as engineer or even physician. It wasn’t that I considered myself incapable or unintelligent. I just didn’t consider those options.

The other night on Saturday Night Live, Chris Rock was discussing the possibility that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be president. He insisted that white women have not struggled, and he attempted to develop this idea with examples of black men hounded by racists, executed, tortured, silenced. And it is true that these atrocities happened. But he is forgetting the quiet desperation of birthing thirteen children, losing perhaps half of them before they reached adulthood, spending days working in the kitchen and in the fields, sewing by candlelight, teaching children, helpmeet to a husband, always owned by some man from birth to death, whether father, husband, or son. Who is he to belittle the suffering of women because it is different from the suffering of black men?

Woolf says,

Young women … you are disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays of Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilisation. What is your excuse? It is all very well for you say, pointing to the streets and squares and forests of the globe swarming with black and white and coffee-coloured inhabitants, all busily engaged in traffic and enterprise and love-making, we have had other work on our hands. Without our doing, those seas would be unsailed and those fertile lands a desert. We have borne and bred and washed and taught, perhaps to the age of six or seven years, the one thousand six hundred and twenty-three million human beings who are, according to statistics, at present in existence, and that, allowing that some had help, takes time. (112)

While it is true that women have made strides since Woolf wrote this essay in 1928, I was rather dismayed by how little we have actually moved in the grand scheme of things. We actually debate issues such as whether America is ready for a woman president (or a black president, for that matter)? Why? Why are women still paid less for the same work as men? Why are little girls sold dolls who tell them “math is hard”? Why is one of the worst insults a man can deliver to another man a pejorative term for a woman’s reproductive organs?

A feminist is someone who believes that men and women should be equal, but you will find that many people in our world today are loathe to call themselves feminists, even if they believe in equality for the sexes.

I am glad that I am living today rather than in the time of our earliest women writers. Did you know that Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, tried to drown herself? Her skirts buoyed her up and saved her life. Wollstonecraft’s thesis was much the same as Woolf’s: women are not intellectually inferior to men; women have not had the same opportunities for education, and (Woolf deduces by extension) time, sufficient quiet, and freedom from worries about money in order to create. Nowadays, more families share the workload traditionally borne by women alone. Women have more opportunities for education. But Woolf is right to point out our late start. Our first major writers did not arrive until the nineteenth century — Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, George Sand, Kate Chopin, Louisa May Alcott. Who were their models? As the saying goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. When men writers have had several millennia to develop and refine their craft, women have really had a scant two hundred years. How long have we potentially had a room of our own and money enough to create? Perhaps fifty years? Clearly we have a large task before us. Especially when one considers, as Woolf so aptly points out in her essay, that the subject matter dear to women is undervalued by men.

A Room of One’s Own is a valuable lens through which to look at women’s writing. I can’t claim to understand all of Woolf’s argument, but I wish more men — and women — might read this essay with an open mind.

Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word [Shakespeare’s sister] and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; the need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh. This opportunity, as I think, it is now coming within your power to give her. For my belief is that if we live another century or so … and have five hundred a year each of us and rooms of our own; if we have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think; if we escape the common sitting room … then the dead poet who was Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unknown who were her forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born. (113-114)

[tags]Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, Shakespeare’s sister, feminism, writing[/tags]

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