a reading list for poets who want to be novelists
20 books to entertain, uplift & maybe just kick your poet-brain into novel-mode
Every poet who’s thought about writing a novel has heard the same advice: slow down, add more, learn to plot. Some of the best novels, though, often work the way poems do—through rhythm, image, compression, obsession.
So below I’ve got just that for you. Beware, though, this isn’t a list of “lyrical” novels—that word has been used to death and means nothing anymore. You won’t find craft books here either. I truly feel that the work of learning to write a novel doesn’t primarily occur by reading about how to write a novel. We learn, most foundationally, by reading other books and talking about them.
So, dig into any of these and tell us if we missed some that should be here! And if you’ve read any of the books on this list, tell us what you thought?
Beloved — Toni Morrison ✦ Repetition and refrain used the way a poem uses them, to haunt.
The Passion According to G.H. — Clarice Lispector ✦ A novel that thinks the way a poem thinks, in beautiful spirals & streams.
Wide Sargasso Sea — Jean Rhys ✦ Lush, furious, every image packed with beauty. Shows how to write landscape like a stanza.
Human Acts — Han Kang ✦ Second person, shifting POV, the body as subject.
Mrs Dalloway — Virginia Woolf ✦ Interior consciousness rendered in real time. The longest poem ever written in prose.
Pedro Páramo — Juan Rulfo ✦ A short ghost story told in fragments. The novel as séance.
Invisible Cities — Italo Calvino ✦ Practically prose poems pretending to be a novel. And gets away with it completely.
Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston ✦ Music, reverence, turmoil.
Love in the Time of Cholera — Gabriel García Márquez ✦ Obsession sustained across half a century. Teaches you that a single feeling can be the plot.
Parable of the Sower — Octavia Butler ✦ World-building through voice.
Freshwater — Akwaeke Emezi ✦ Multiple selves narrating a single body. Voice as multiplicity.
The Left Hand of Darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin ✦ Proof that speculative fiction can be written at the sentence level of poetry.
The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro ✦ What’s unsaid does all the work. Poets who write by omission—this is yours.
The Stranger — Albert Camus ✦ Flat affect as style. Proof that emotional distance is its own intensity.
Hopscotch — Julio Cortázar ✦ Read it in any order. The novel as open field composition.
Pale Fire — Vladimir Nabokov ✦ A novel disguised as a poem with commentary. Poets, this is literally about you.
As I Lay Dying — William Faulkner ✦ The novel as polyphonic poem.
Piranesi — Susanna Clarke ✦ Wonder as a narrative mode. A poet’s sense of awe stretched across a world.
Tomb of Sand — Geetanjali Shree ✦ Partition, gender, language bending & blending. Hindi lit’s first Booker winner.
Disgrace — J.M. Coetzee ✦ The novel every poet ought to read in order to learn what sustained literary discipline looks like.
Ok now we need a list for novelists who want to be poets!! 🙏🏼
Wow, thank you! I've read 9 of these and will soon be reading the other 11. What I often wonder about these books is what would their query and synopsis look like?