Having a baby made my anxiety spike. For the first couple of weeks after he was born, I would stare at the ubiquitous “CAUTION” tags on every baby thing we own; Brian moved some tools he had in the house back out to the shed because I kept think of how they could hurt the baby; in exhaustion at night while feeding Mateo, I cried out of terror that something bad would happen to him.

Eventually, I realized that I had allowed all of my thoughts to be devoted to the baby. I knew that I needed to bring myself back into my thoughts and actions and to integrate him into them. So I charged my Kindle — I had allowed its battery to die — and downloaded Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose, which I read while I fed Mateo at night.

Devoting some time and thoughts to something besides taking care of the baby helped my anxiety a lot. It’s not completely gone, especially when I’m extra tired, but now when my thoughts start drifting and racing, I just pick up the Kindle. I finished Reading Like a Writer very quickly (my review below will cover part of the reason why), then read a few Chekov short stories (crying in an enjoyably melancholy, mono no aware way after reading “A Grasshopper”), and now I’m halfway done with Middlemarch. Sometimes I read aloud to Mateo. (He enjoys Yeats as well.)

As for Reading Like a Writer — for me, it was more of a description of how I already read than a work offering me new insight. Francine Prose examines several aspects of fiction — the importance of word choice, sentence construction, how dialogue and gesture contribute to character development (the chapter on gesture was the most interesting to me).

Prose lauds her formalist education, in which literature is analyzed on a craft level, without reference to author biography, history, or literary theory that is more grounded in philosophy or politics than literature. I agree that this a very fine kind of education for a writer to receive; my literary education seems to have been similar to Prose’s — so I am pretty well-versed in the formalist close reading and explication.

Unfortunately, Prose doesn’t offer deep explication, and when she does offer any, I tended not to agree with it. (Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. and Mrs. Bennet enjoy a marriage that is “playful” and “respectful”?) Prose also does not devote any of the book to what is the most difficult part of crafting fiction for me — plot. Most of the book is made up of long passages from other works. I appreciated the exposure to works I had not before known of and Prose’s breaking down the components to take note of in fiction, but the work struck me as a bit of an easy write — a little thin on insight and effort.