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Originally Posted by L1Wulf
@wrryntx: I was eyeballing Reading Like a Writer as well, if you get around to peeking at it before the end of the month, I'd like to hear your opinion.
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I've read about 20% of the book. The short version of my opinion is "I like it and expect to reread it several times."
The long version is moderately complex. Let's get the potential negatives out of the way. As you might imagine with such a book, there are numerous and often somewhat lengthy quotations from other works. When the author discusses one of these passages you find yourself wanting to reread it. I find myself somewhat less willing to flip back to the passage using the Reader than I would be with paper.
Also, as you'd expect with a book like this, I find myself disputing the author's opinions of what writing is superb, and especially why this is true, and more especially what the writer was thinking when they wrote the superb passage. In the first place, this is probably a positive, not a negative -- it means I'm thinking. In the second place, the author is ... well ... an author. I can't even claim to be a wannabe writer. I'm more like a wishiwuza writer. This is why I think I'll reread this book many times; it is likely that the author is correct 95% of the time and that I am at present too ignorant and unsophisticated to appreciate the full impact of her examples.
OK, so the "negatives" have also taken care of some of the positives. Others include the fact that this book serves as a pointer to works worth reading that I probably would not have considered otherwise. The author's advice aims at being practical and for me she usually hits the mark. Some of her examples in the chapter on Sentences are just simply stunning; I would never have considered trying to convey ideas with sentences like that -- but I will now (after a lot of practice in private).
This is too long already, so let me close by saying that I can't yet say the book is remarkable but I can say that it's interesting and useful.