/lit/ - Literature

>>9915915
Adler's book isn't very useful.

I much prefer pic related

>>9689538
>pic related
I didn't sleep much last night bc it's p good desu.

>>9439369
This book is pretty good too senpai

This is very good.

I've been shilling it a bit, my apologies, but it is good.

When it comes to concentration you just have to know when to put a book down and when to power through.

When it comes to appreciating literature, which, if you know how to, can improve your concentration, I highly recommend pic related.

Don't turn reading into a chore.

Psa: This is 10x better than how to read by that Mortimer guy

>>8133522

This book really helped me out on issues like those, how dialogue works, when to start a new paragraph, etc.

The book basically says there aren't really any specific rules, there are many ways to write well depending, here are some examples from famous authors, so read a lot and read carefully to specifically find out what authors do to make their writing effective.

Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose - 4/5

My favorite of the bunch. Prose is a writer and teaches writing courses. She has a similar approach to Eagleton (mostly teaching by practical examples of close reading), but with superior execution. Her view is that the best way to learn how to write is by reading good books and taking on their techniques through close reading and osmosis.

Two aspects make it stand out a bit. First, a lot of the advice is given from the perspective of writing, in the style of "look how well [author] does this thing, it's a good technique and you should use it". Second, there are various personal anecdotes interspersed throughout, I thought they worked well. She has a Bloomian attitude:

>THE only time my passion for reading steered me in the wrong direction was when I let it persuade me to go to graduate school. There, I soon realized that my love for books was unshared by many of my classmates and professors. I found it hard to understand what they did love, exactly, and this gave me an anxious shiver that would later seem like a warning about what would happen to the teaching of literature over the decade or so after I dropped out of my Ph.D. program. That was when literary academia split into warring camps of deconstructionists, Marxists, feminists, and so forth, all battling for the right to tell students that they were reading “texts” in which ideas and politics trumped what the writer had actually written.

>I was struck by how little attention they had been taught to pay to the language, to the actual words and sentences that a writer had used. Instead, they had been encouraged to form strong, critical, and often negative opinions of geniuses who had been read with delight for centuries before they were born. They had been instructed to prosecute or defend these authors, as if in a court of law, on charges having to do with the writers’ origins, their racial, cultural, and class backgrounds. They had been encouraged to rewrite the classics into the more acceptable forms that the authors might have discovered had they only shared their young critics’ level of insight, tolerance, and awareness.

It's fairly well structured, especially when compared to Eagleton. There first chapter covers words, the next sentences, then paragraphs, and so on. The barrage of examples within each chapter can someone be a bit much, but over all I thought it worked well.

>Words
A ton of practical examples; words not mentioned are often the most important part; not everything needs to be acted out; pyrotechnics vs appearing calculated: both are tough!; pay particular attention to deployments of words that are technically wrong, but perfect in context; some writers _require_ word-for-word close reading (Faulkner, Joyce, Pinecone); pay attention to tone and its implications.