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.
- The Blue Hotel by Stephen Crane
- The Open Boat by Stephen Crane
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- The Red and the Black by Stendhal
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
- Hail and Farewell by George Moore
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Oxford Book of English Verse
- The Enormous Room by E.E. Cummings
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Far Away and Long Ago by W.H. Hudson
- 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)
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