One thing that's great about working at TED is the suggestions we get from our authors about books that have been helpful in their journey. Here's one from mystery writer Paula Cappa.

Yesterday I was poking around TED's Web site and found your list of suggested reading books for writers and saw many familiar titles. Everyone at TED is so up on everything in the writing/reading world, and you probably know of this book already, but I thought I put in a good word for "Reading Like a Writer" by Francine Prose for you to consider adding to that list.

I just finished it. This isn't like other fiction writing books that focus on the strategies of plot, mechanics, story, character. etc. Prose explores the perspective and needs of the reader with such depth and detail that I found it all irresistible. The book is like a mini workshop examining the masters of great writing and how they accomplish their art. I'm actually going to read this again because it's so rich with insight. Here's the blurb I found online to temp anyone who hasn't read it.

"In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue, to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail, and to James Joyce and Katherine Mansfield for clever examples of how to employ gesture to create character. She cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which literature is crafted."

So if your looking to add a fiction writing book to that list, this one is certainly a gem.

Paula Cappa

Pound Ridge, NY