Read Dickens This Summer, And More Advice On 'What To Read And Why'

Author and National Book Award winner Francine Prose is frequently asked for suggestions of good books to read. Now, she’s published a book about it.

Here & Now‘s Lisa Mullins talks with Prose about “What to Read and Why.”

Summer Reading Picks From Francine Prose

• “Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens
• The short stories of Mavis Gallant
• “Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky” by Patrick Hamilton
• The Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn
• “Cries Unheard” by Gitta Sereny
• “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid
• The novels of Jane Austen

Book Excerpt: ‘What To Read And Why’

by Francine Prose

Reading is among the most private, the most solitary things that we can do. A book is a kind of refuge to which we can go for the assurance that, as long as we are reading, we can leave the worries and cares of our everyday lives behind us and enter, however briefly, another reality, populated by other lives, a world distant in time and place