The books one should read to improve writing.

[Arj]

Please let me know the books I must read to improve my writing skills.
I have read just a couple of books from Charles Dickens.

[Darcy88]

I swear that reading sizeable portions of this particular translation of Don Quixote enhances my writing: http://www.amazon.ca/Don-Quixote-Miguel-Cervantes/dp/037575699X/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1372664224&sr=1-7&keywords=don+quixote

I think reading Emerson and Nietzsche can improve one's prose. James Joyce, Joseph Conrad and Oscar Wilde are exemplary stylists. Hemingway can teach you to jettison needlessly extravagant language. Immersing myself in Kurt Vonnegut recently has opened up new imaginative horizons, pushed me towards exploring and attempting things I'd never before considered in my writing.

[kiki1982]

Peresonally I don't like Dickens for this purpose, because his style is not superior. He started writing for newspapers in this day and beceause of that his style is quite simple, not extraordinary and not extraordinarily precise in wording.

Trollope I like for his lively and precise characterisation without being too wordy.
Thackeray (judging from Vanity Fair) is a bit more hoity-toity, especially because of the French in between (he lived in France for a while), but he still reads nicely.
The Brontës flow nicely. Emily is the quickest to read. I think Anne is the most precise (she comes across as trying too hard in the beginning). Charlotte is a bit better, but se still takes care.
Hardy knows many words and his descriptions of nature are superior.
Wilde is good prose, but probably he does better in dialogue.

Having said that, though, I think the improve your writing you should probably read Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. If there is any language that is so precise and that flows so nicely, without being mundane, it must be that.

Saying that, I quite like the quirky style of PG Wodehouse too.

[kev67]

F.R. Leavis only considered Jane Austen, George Elliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence to be great novelists in the English tradition. Contentiously, he excluded Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy (link (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F._R._Leavis)).

[hannah_arendt]

I like Dickens very much but I think that Tolkien and Frank Herbert helped me a lot. I appreciate also Herta Mueller and Szymborska. Thanks to Mueller I started writting using less words making my style less baroque.

[kiki1982]

Oh, yes, I forgot Joseph Conrad. A Pole as well.

[Tobeornotobe]

For training purposes, I re-write Great Gatsby word-by-word and I can read the book in much more detail and actually take a look at very small details I have missed out after reading several times. I practice my writing on a daily basis, and it seems like the only way to improve writing is read everything onto your hands... But anyway, back to my point: Great Gatsby would be worth a look at least. And Nietzsche. My philosophy professor once told me that people who hate Nietzsche also read his works, only because his writing is superb.

[Darcy88]

Dickens is a master. Great Expectations is equal to anything Lawrence wrote, and I'm a Lawrence fanatic. And any discussion of great English novelists has to include the Brontes, so I don't know what this Leavis chap was thinking.

[kiki1982]

Oh, that's cleared up then. I once opened the first page of a novel by Lawrence and found it ghastly, flicked further, remained ghastly. Went a little bit further (I wasn't going to be beaten that easily), still the same. Now it makes sense. Just couldn't stand the style (actually I just did it again to verify, same abysmal impression). I can't stand short sentences. Short sentences are for primary school. Language has invented conjunctions to be used, not to be replaced by a full stop.

Looking at Sons and Lovers, Dickens is better by long long miles.

I think you should read Dickens if you want to have a light time and if you just read one chapter a week. If you can keep that up, it might remain interesting. Otherwise, I think his novels could do with some serious editing (just to take out the repetitions). Otherwise, he has a nice flow like Trollope, although Trollope writes more flowery and genteel.

But Lawrence...

[kev67]

Dickens is a master. Great Expectations is equal to anything Lawrence wrote, and I'm a Lawrence fanatic. And any discussion of great English novelists has to include the Brontes, so I don't know what this Leavis chap was thinking.

Leavis seems to have been a man with strong opinions. He wrote a book called the The Great Tradition in 1948 which opens, "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Elliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad " Interestingly, two were women and two were not born in Britain. Later in the book, it seems, Leavis adds D.H. Lawrence to the list. Leavis devotes chapters to Elliot, James and Conrad but not Austen because he thinks she requires a book to herself, so presumably he thinks Jane Austen is the best English novelist of all time. The last chapter is about Charles Dickens' Hard Times, which Leavis rates very highly, but I suppose he does not think enough of Dickens' other books to consider him a great.

[Darcy88]

Oh, that's cleared up then. I once opened the first page of a novel by Lawrence and found it ghastly, flicked further, remained ghastly. Went a little bit further (I wasn't going to be beaten that easily), still the same. Now it makes sense. Just couldn't stand the style (actually I just did it again to verify, same abysmal impression). I can't stand short sentences. Short sentences are for primary school. Language has invented conjunctions to be used, not to be replaced by a full stop.

Looking at Sons and Lovers, Dickens is better by long long miles.

I think you should read Dickens if you want to have a light time and if you just read one chapter a week. If you can keep that up, it might remain interesting. Otherwise, I think his novels could do with some serious editing (just to take out the repetitions). Otherwise, he has a nice flow like Trollope, although Trollope writes more flowery and genteel.

But Lawrence...

I don't know what you mean by short sentences. I just opened Sons and Lovers at random and the first sentence I hit upon was "she had such a short body on her high stool that her head, with its great bands of bright brown hair, seemed over large, as did her pale heavy face." I just flipped to another page and there does seem to be a lot of short sentences, but I have never found this to detract from the experience of reading him. The next sentence I just now randomly selected took up a full 5 lines.

I don't think Dickens is better by long, long miles. I could see the argument being made that Dickens is equal or even slightly superior, but not by a great extent. Lawrence has more to say to me than Dickens. People seem to either love him or despise him. I fall in the former category.

[cafolini]

"Do you know how to eat a fig in society?"

[Darcy88]

Kill Money

"Kill money, put money out of existence.
It is a perverted instinct, a hidden thought
which rots the brain, the blood, the bones, the stones, the soul.


Make up your mind about it;
that society must establish itself upon a different principle
from the one we've got now.


We must have the courage of mutual trust.
We must have the modesty of simple living.
And the individual must have his house, food, and fire all free like a bird."

D.H. Lawrence

[Desolation]

The writers that come closest to your personal aesthetic sensibilities - and the ones that are farthest from your personal aesthetic sensibilities. And the writer that fall in some gray area between the two poles. You can learn a lot about prose style, structure, narrative, character development, etc etc etc from all of it.

[Whifflingpin]

Edmund Burke
Gibbon

[cafolini]

I don't know what you mean by short sentences. I just opened Sons and Lovers at random and the first sentence I hit upon was "she had such a short body on her high stool that her head, with its great bands of bright brown hair, seemed over large, as did her pale heavy face." I just flipped to another page and there does seem to be a lot of short sentences, but I have never found this to detract from the experience of reading him. The next sentence I just now randomly selected took up a full 5 lines.

I don't think Dickens is better by long, long miles. I could see the argument being made that Dickens is equal or even slightly superior, but not by a great extent. Lawrence has more to say to me than Dickens. People seem to either love him or despise him. I fall in the former category.

There is no doubt in my estimation that Dickens and Lawrence are two of the great naturals to the British story. Dickens is more recognized, but who is better depends on what you pay attention to.

"Do you know how to eat a fig in society?" ~ One of the characters of Lawrence with fork and knife. I don't remember the novel's title, but I'm instinctively thinking it was Women in Love. I thought it was hilarious many year ago, when I read it.

[Calidore]

As the posts here are making clear, there's lots of different kinds of good writing. Everyone has their own unique voice and style; the best way to improve yours is to read and analyze the writings of people you want to write like. For one example, if you want to be an "invisible" author, you might look at Elmore Leonard's ten rules and read some of his work.

[ennison]

Just read and write a lot. Leonard - yeuch. Personal reaction. Same if you gave me snails to eat.

[EmptySeraph]

Jonathan Swift, Samuel Butler, Beckett. Then, you should perhaps move on to the French: Montaigne, Pascal, Rochefoucauld, Chamfort — these are moralists, and their concise style has a huge reputation. You can keep reading the French with Valéry and Cioran, which, in the manner of the aforementioned moralists, are masters of style (Valéry had been a pupil of Mallarmé, I think the explanation suffices, and Cioran, well, his French was so refined and incredibly well articulated, with expressions perfectly crafted that the French themselves named him one of their great stylists, him, a foreigner, a stateless imigrant from Romania!!). Of course, there still remain Baltasar Gracian and Friedrich Nietzsche, geniuses of the incisive fragment. Oh, and don't forget Lichtenberg, another marvelous aphorist. And you could also add Georg Simmel and Ludwig Klages to your list.

P.S.: Joubert and Saint-Simon are also masters of the perfectly proportioned piece of writing.

[Red Terror]

Please let me know the books I must read to improve my writing skills.
I have read just a couple of books from Charles Dickens.


Check out this essay by Isaac Asimov. I don't know what kind of writing you are aiming for, but in my opinion keep it real; avoid affectation. I found this brief essay very enlightening.

[ajvenigalla]

For something of a simple style, to coney grand effects with a purity of diction, look to the King James Bible, and Chekhov, and late Tolstoy (particularly of "How Much Land Does a Man Need?"). For something more rugged, see to the Tyndale Bible.

Heightened style is beautiful in Melville and Dickens, who bring poetical and rhetorical power to the syntactical constructions of their brocaded prose. Bleak House is testament that Dickens was a great master of the art of rhetoric, and his speaking power is conveyed, both in the passages of lush description and physical reality that pervade his world, and the linguistic play and exuberance of his emancipated language. Dickens is the Shakespeare of the novel when it comes to sheer fecundity, Melville being the Shakespeare of tragic novel. Dostoevsky, Melville, and Dickens are three of the most Shakespearean novelists of all time.

Nabokov and Conrad are rich and beautiful and aesthetically powerful.

Dostoevsky for a dialogic headiness.

For startling similes and pyrotechnic virtuostic figurative language, I like Cormac McCarthy, Raymond Chandler, and Flannery O'Connor.

[mortalterror]

According to Ezra Pound in, I believe it was the ABCs of Reading, you should read the best examples of everything there is. Then you know what's possible as well as what's already been done. As I recall, he recommended a lot of ancient Greek texts, Dante, Shakespeare, that sort of thing.