Readings For Writers: Pick of the Week 10/13/14

Every other week, a member of the Grub community recommends a book they find helpful or inspirational from a craft perspective. This week, Grub's Head Instructor Chip Cheek recommends his favorite novel. 

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson is possibly my single favorite novel; I read it for the language—beautiful, lyric—and her extended metaphors and images; it’s about two orphaned sisters raised by an eccentric aunt near a glacial lake. Gilead is also wonderful, won the Pulitzer a few years ago. (There’s a follow-up to that book, Home, which is less good, but still good.) And she’s a phenomenal essayist, too, on religion and culture; her book The Death of Adam is great; the essay “Psalm Eight” in that book is mind-blowing. And a newer book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, is fantastic—just read it; it’s a more contemporary cultural critique. She’s a devout Christian, but you don’t need to be religious to be blown away and deeply affected by her writing.

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