How long does it take to read Reading Like a Writer?
A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them
Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose takes about 5 hours 26 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 26 minutes
A weekend read
First published 2006. 296 pages, about 81,400 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 3 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 26 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 24 minutes |
The page count is the median across 16 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose. In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carre for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart.
Subjects: Books and reading, Rhetoric, Creative writing, Authors, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction
