The Art of X-Ray Reading cover art

The Art of X-Ray Reading

How the Secrets of 25 Great Works of Literature Will Improve Your Writing

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The Art of X-Ray Reading

By: Roy Peter Clark
Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
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About this listen

Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, offers writing lessons we can draw from 25 great texts.

Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made.

In The Art of X-Ray Reading, Clark invites you to don your X-ray reading glasses and join him on a guided tour through some of the most exquisite and masterful literary works of all time, from The Great Gatsby to Lolita to The Bluest Eye and many more. Along the way, he shows you how to mine these masterpieces for invaluable writing strategies that you can add to your arsenal and apply in your own writing. Once you've experienced X-ray reading, your writing will never be the same again.

©2016 Roy Peter Clark (P)2016 Hachette Audio Literary History & Criticism Words, Language & Grammar Writing & Publishing

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Most relevant  
I mistakenly thought the book would teach you the art of x-ray reading. But it was an analysis of 25 books. It was useful, just not what I expected. How to actually x-ray read was only mentioned in the last minute of the book.

Useful but doesn't teach you how to x-ray read

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The narrator has a deeply annoying habit of reading names in what he imagines is their original accent. So slightly russian for nabokov etc. Likewise accents are used for some quotes. It's painful when combined with the dense nature of the information

Apart from that issue - which I found really got in the way of the text - it's an interesting book. took me a while to listen to as I needed to absorb the information bit by bit.

The author tends to share his own writing - which isn't that good. Particularly not compared to the classics he's discussing.

Dense information - truly annoying reading

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