This year, I had a student, E, who was exceptional in many ways, but most noticeable was her certainty that she would be a published writer. Indeed, that she would make her living writing. I have no doubt that she will: she has the talent and the drive. What she’s lacking, of course, is what all young writers lack: experience. Not just live experience — reading experience is just as important. So at the end of the year, I made her a list of books I’ve read which seem to me to teach something important about writing and a few films that teach something about good storytelling:
Books
Title | Author | Reason Why It’s Important/What To Learn |
| Absalom, Absalom! | William Faulkner | This is simply the best book ever written. There is so much to learn from this book:
This is unquestionably my all-time favorite book, and I read it at least once every two years. |
| The Unbearable Lightness of Being* | Milan Kundera | This novel mixes philosophical musings, random bits of weird history, and a fantastic story set in Prague, with the Prague Spring as its setting. (Google it before you read this.) Kudera uses an unconventional point of view in this book: not really first person, not really third, it’s a curious mix of both. You’ll never forget your first time reading this, and you’ll walk away wanting to imitate its totally original point of view. |
| As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | Each chapter is told by different 15 different narrators, and it uses a non-linear plotline. |
| Red Plenty | Francis Spufford | Historical fiction at its best. This excellent novel blends actual historical characters mixed with invented characters. Each chapter is a different time and different place in the USSR with different characters, but there are a few overlaps that provide continuity, so it’s a good study of fragmented plot development. |
| The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain | Twain is the master of making jokes by leaving much of the joke in the reader’s mind: he gets you going and then stops, knowing your train of thought will end in humor. He’s also a master of writing in comic dialect. |
| The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | ||
| My Ántonia | Willa Cather | There’s nothing complicated or groundbreaking in this novel. It’s just simple, linear, first-person story-telling at its best; a lovely, lovely book. |
| Tales of Galicia | Andrzej Stasiuk | This novel mixes magical-realism, untrustworthy narrators, non-linear and completely fragmented plotlines to create a masterpiece. One of my all-time favorites. |
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens | It’s Dickens — read all his works. He’s a master. He’s especially good at creating multiple plotlines and weaving them together. |
| Great Expectations | ||
| 4 3 2 1* | Paul Auster | The book of multiple plotlines: this novel takes one character and imagines four different lives for him. There are overlaps and similarities, but it’s the differences that make the book incredible. And that ending: you see it coming a thousand miles away, and yet it still shocks you and takes your breath away. |
| The Noise of Time | Julian Barnes | This novel is told in short fragments. There is a plot, but it’s not immediately obvious. |
| The New York Trilogy | Paul Auster | The meta-fiction masterpiece in which the author mixes real life with the story, this novel layers different realities (including the reader’s) into a mind-bending blending of storylines. |
| East of Eden | John Steinbeck | Possibly the greatest straight, simple, linear-plotline novelist America has produced, Steinbeck simply tells unforgettable stories in a straightforward, compelling manner. |
| The Grapes of Wrath | ||
| Being There* | Jerzy Kosiński | This novel utilizes something like magical realism in a subdued way. |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude* | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | The master of magical realism, Marquez is a spellbinding writer. You will never read a book with a story told in quite the odd, confusing, compelling way as this book. One of the most original books you will ever read. |
| Go Set a Watchman | Harper Lee | This was the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. It will teach you how much a story can change upon revision. |
| To the Lighthouse | Virginia Woolf | This book completely blew my mind the first time I read it. There’s no way to describe what you can learn from this book. Just read it. It’s incredible. |
| Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | These are long, complicated novels. They are also perfect novels. Demons is my favorite and his best, but most people put Brothers Karamazov in that slot. They’re difficult to read because they require a lot of background knowledge, and the Russian names are difficult at first to someone not familiar with the language. Read along with an audio version. |
| Demons | ||
| Crime and Punishment | ||
| The Haunted Bookshop | Christopher Morley | Everyone who loves books should read this one–a story about a bookshop?! What could be better. |
| A Gentleman in Moscow | Amor Towles | This is just a charming story. Nothing experimental or bizzare — just a great story told expertly. |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte | A surprisingly modern novel that’s relatively old (1847). You’ll learn how to maintain a theme throughout a novel, how to give that theme a surprising twist toward the end. |
| Wide Sargasso Sea | Jean Rhys | One of the most original books written. This was written some 120 after Jane Eyre, and it is something of a prequel to Bronte’s novel. DO NOT read this without reading JE first. You’ll learn how to find inspiration from other books. |
| Angela’s Ashes | Frank McCourt | This book will teach you how to write a memoir like a novel. |
| The Outsiders | S. E. Hinton | She wrote it when she was 16. Enough said. |
| The Plague | Albert Camus | An example of existentialist (look it up) writing — it’s a novel with a philosophical agenda. |
| Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China | Jung Chang | Family history at its finest. It will also teach you a lot about Chinese history. |
| The Name of the Rose* | Umberto Eco | Historical fiction that’s incredible: a mystery set in a 14th-century monastery. How could you not want to read that? |
| The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | What happens when a Russian writes a novel with the devil as one of the main characters? Perfection happens. |
| The Diving Bell and the Butterfly | Jean-Dominique Bauby | I mentioned this in journalism; we read one of the chapters. From this you’ll learn how to write short, powerful observations about some of the most mundane things. |
| Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster | Jon Krakauer | This is history written like it’s a novel. |
| The Sense of an Ending* | Julian Barnes | A slim book about confusion that puts the reader in the exact same spot of ignorance as the protagonist. It will teach you pacing. |
| Breakfast of Champions* | Kurt Vonnegut | A meta-novel that’s mind-bending, Breakfast also incorporates little sketches into the novel. |
* Indicates mature content.
Films
Title | Reason Why It’s Important |
| In the Mood for Love (PG) | A Chinese film. A slow, measured story that seems simple yet has incredible tension just beneath the surface. Excellent ending. |
| The Lives of Others (R) | A German film. Absolutely the best ending of any film on the planet. My all-time favorite drama. |
| Conspiracy (R) | This film features a bunch of men sitting around a table talking for 90% of the film. Incredible acting, though, and it will teach you what good dialogue sounds like. |
| Dangerous Liasons (R) | Intersecting plots and plotters plotting against each other, this film will teach you how to tell a story in which emotions (in this case, fury and contempt) are always present, always hinted at, yet never fully shown — until the end. I think there was a remake of this. I’m referring to the 1988 original with John Malkovich, who is utterly brilliant in this film. |
Sadly, most of these are rated R, so your folks will have to make the call on them.