Books for Writers: A Look at Ballard's Super-Cannes

         The hero of  J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes is Paul Sinclair, a magazine editor who moves to the gated community of Eden-Olympia with his young wife. Paul was once a man of action but a flying accident, and the fact his wife is the primary breadwinner and the impetus for  their move, has rendered him largely impotent. Paul turns his attention to a mystery: Why did the young doctor, whose house they now live in and whose job Paul’s wife now has, go nuts and shoot ten people?

Books for Writers: Undressing Jane Austen

Many of the “classics” I've read were consumed in my teens and 20s, some dozens of years to decades ago. Unlike the reluctant high-school and college academics of today, I actually had to read these books to do well on my literature assignments, rather than placing my hopes on understandings gleaned through online study guides.

There have been a lot of books under the bridge since then, and while I remembered reading Jane Austen's work, I'd completely forgotten how it made me feel like my head was stuffed full of excited chickens. My voyage through Pride and Prejudice this month brought it all back.

Books for Writers: "Reading Like a Writer"

On the 270^th page of Francine Prose's 2006 bestseller Reading Like a Writer there begins a list, apparently compiled by Prose, of “Books to Be Read Immediately.” When I first read Prose's book, which I purchased a couple of years ago as a three-for-the-price-of-two deal at Barnes & Noble (along with Thomas C. Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor and my third copy of Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'), I used a red pen to mark off the ones I already had under my belt.

When I tallied the results, I discovered I had read a mere 12 out of Prose's 100 or so must-read books. This month, after reading Prose's book again, I turned to her list and made, perhaps, four more red marks.

Several questions came to mind then: Why did Prose include so many translated works on her list when she so stresses the importance of careful, “slow reading” of the writer's own words? Why does she believe King Lear is more important to read than, say, Hamlet? If Prose finds Catcher in the Rye less worthy than Franny and Zooey, why do we keep inflicting hapless Holden on our school children? Perhaps, most important to me and my intellectual relationship with Prose: How many red marks would she be able to make if I gave her my own list of “Books to Be Read Immediately”?