Brain Pickings is a fabulous compendium of what’s out there and related to creativity, thinking, culture and art. We highly recommend checking it out – in the meantime, here’s the list on how to read and write better:
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1 The Elements of Style Illustrated – marries Maira Kalman’s signature whimsy with Strunk and White’s indispensable style guide to create an instant classic.
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2 Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott – the 1994 classic is as much a practical guide to the writer’s life as it is a profound wisdom-trove on the life of the heart and mind.
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3 On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King – part master-blueprint, part memoir, part meditation on the writer’s life.
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4 Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You, Ray Bradbury – Bradbury shares not only his wisdom and experience in writing, but also his contagious excitement for the craft.
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5 The War of Art: Break Through the Block and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, Steven Pressfield — a personal defense system of sorts against our greatest forms of resistance. “Resistance” with a capital R, that is.
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6 Advice to Writers, Jon Winokur – From how to find a good agent to what makes characters compelling, it spans the entire spectrum from the aspirational to the utilitarian.
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7 How to Write a Sentence, And How to Read One, Stanley Fish – an insightful, rigorous manual on the art of language that may just be one of the best such tools since The Elements of Style.
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8 Ernest Hemingway on Writing, Larry W. Phillips – a collection of the finest, wittiest, most profound of Hemingway’s reflections on writing, the nature of the writer, and the elements of the writer’s life.
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9 How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler & Charles van Doren – from basic reading to systematic skimming and inspectional reading to speed reading, the how-to’s apply as efficiently to practical textbooks and science books as they do to poetry and fiction.
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