Hemingway’s reading list for writers

For 2016 I plan to read more literary works to enhance my writing. I was stumped as to how to do it until I came across an article in ‘Brain Pickings’ by Maria Popova. She discusses Hemingway giving writing advice to his protegé, A Samuelsen. Hemingway listed sixteen books that every writer should read.

1. The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane
2. The Open Boat by Stephen Crane
3. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
4. Dubliners by James Joyce
5. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
6. Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
7. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
8. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
9. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
10. Hail and Farewell by George Moore
11. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. The Oxford Book of English Verse
13. The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
15. Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson
16. The American by Henry James

This gave me the idea to go through the reading lists compiled by authors I admire and write a short piece on selected texts. It won’t be a scholarly discussion, just my response to the text and what I can take away from it to use in my writing.

Hemingway, the writer known to have had a profound impact on the craft of writing, is one of my favourite authors.

(For the full article go to www.brainpickings.org)