Perilous Adventures
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Reading Lists

n a bourke

Have we said already that you cannot write without reading: or, more precisely, that you cannot write well without reading well?

It’s alarming how many people who write and aspire to be published do not read, or do not read avidly and widely enough to have a real sense of the world they wish to be a part of.

So, here’s a small but essential piece of advice for those who wish to write: READ!

First, read the weekend review pages of at least two national papers, if not more. Read international ones if you can, even if you can only read the free online bits.

Go to the bookshop.

Find out who won that competition you want to enter last year. Read their books, and the books of those who were shortlisted. Don’t blindly lambast them: read them with admiration and respect. Try to uncover what it is about them that has made them successful.

See that list at the bottom of this page? They’re all authors worth reading, for one reason or another. Some are novelists, some poets, some write non-fiction, but you can forgive them that, nu?

Now, get a pen and a highlighter. Underline all the writers whose work you know and have read. Highlight all the writers whose work you have heard of, but not read.

Now, start with those names that are unmarked - the ones you’ve never heard of and have not read. Go to the bookshop (or the library) as soon as you can and start with one of them: find their books and read them. Find out what you were missing out on. Find out what they did (or are doing) right.

And remember, if you’re not published yet, to start with their first book. The one that got them over the line that first time. Just like you.

Just some writers worth reading:

A S Byatt
Alice Munro
Anne Fadiman
Anne Frank
Annie Dillard
Barbara Kingsolver
Charles Dickens
Christina Stead
Czeslaw Mielosz
Dashiell Hammett
David Mitchell
Delia Falconer
Dom De Lillo
Donald Barthelme
Doris Lessing
Douglas Adams
Emily Bronte
Emma Donoghue
Flannery O’Connor
Franz Kafka
Fyodor Dostoevsky
George Eliot
Gertrude Stein
Graham Greene
Gustave Flaubert
Hannah Arendt
Helen Garner
Henning Mankell
Henry James
Honore de Balzac
Ian McEwan
Isaac Babel
Italo Calvino
Ivan Turgenev
J D Salinger
Jack Kerouac
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Jane Bowles
Janet Malcolm
Jeanette Winterson
Joan Didion
John Alvide Lindquist
John Cheever
John le Carre
John Milton
John Wyndham
Jorge Borges
Julian Barnes
Junot Diaz
Kate Grenville
Katherine Mansfield
Kathryn Harrison
Kelly Link
Laurence Sterne
Leo Tolstoy
Malcolm Knox
Marcel Proust
Margaret Atwood
Maureen McHugh
Maurice Sendak
Miguel Cervantes
Nadezdha Mandelstam
Oliver Sacks
Patrick White
Paul Bowles
Paul Theroux
Philip Pullman
Philip Roth
Primo Levi
Raimond Gaita
Raymond Carver
Rebecca West
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Richardson
Stendhal
Sue Woolfe
Thomas Kenneally
Thomas Pynchon
Toni Morrison
Tove Jansson
Victor Kelleher
William Shakespeare
Vladimir Nabokov
Zadie Smith
Zbigniew Herbert

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issue 08:09 | archive by category | archive by author