Reading List for Studying Setting and Description

If you’ve been following my blog this year, you know I’m spending this year studying setting and description. Usually, when I aim to study a specific writing technique or subject, I spend months reading books on the subject and doing writing exercises. This year I wanted to mix something up and spend more time reading examples of it done well. So instead of spending months doing writing exercises, I’m spending months reading well-written books and analyzing the prose for how the writer did it well.

To help me build my study reading list into setting and description, I asked social media and friends for their suggestions of books that crafted settings in memorable and mesmerizing ways and books that had stellar descriptive writing around emotions, food, gore, and/or nature. The suggestions people gave were so good and interesting I figured I’d share the full lists and my study plan.

Setting Reading List

• Gormenghast
• Howl’s Moving Castle
• Neverending Story
• It
• Salen’s Lot
• The Lord of the Rings trilogy
• Dracula
• Dune
• Mars trilogy
• The Shining
• A City Dreaming
• Pedido Street Station
• Updraft
• The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven
• Looking Glass Sound
• O Beautiful
• The Road
• Summer Sons
• Night of the Living Rez
• Harlem Shuffle
• Home
• Haunting of Hill House
• Mexican Gothic
• Giovanni’s Room
• Name of the Wind
• Mists of Avalon
• The Memory Librarian
• Under the Pendulum Sun
• Blood Meridian
• The Green and the Grey
• How to Lost the Time War
• Levithan Wakes
• The Fifth Season
• All Tomorrows
• The Night Circus
• Let the Great World Spin
• Beneath the Sugar Sky
• Dragonflight
• Misery
• Gerald’s Game

Setting Study Reading List

For my study, I didn’t want to try and tackle all of the books on the reading list because I did want to leave room for doing some writing exercises and the other reading I like outside of studying writing. So, I picked:

Five books to read

1. Haunting of Hill House
2. Mexican Gothic
3. Blood Meridian
4. Harlem Shuffle
5. Dune

One book to do some copywork exercises

1. Levithan Wakes

One master study book

1. The Road

Description Reading List

• Haunted
• The Evidence of Things Not Seen
• Demon Copperhead
• Where Bigfoot Walks
• Braiding Sweetgrass
• The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• The High Mountains of Portugal
• The Great Gatsby
• The White Album
• Madam Bovary
• Station Eleven
• We Are Water
• Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
• The Color of Magic
• Outer Dark
• Game of Thrones
• Her Body and Other Parties
• The Wind-up Bird Chronicle
• Under the Jaguar Sun
• Goodbye, Columbus
• Pachinko
• Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• Area X
• A Farewell to Arms
• The Blood Chamber (short story)
• Piranesi
• Tender is the Flesh
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Islanders
• We Can Never Leave this Place
• The Hollow Places
• Sunbleached (short story)
• The Matrix (script)
• The Way. of Shadows
• The Eye of the World
• Slewfoot
• Salt Fat Acid Heat
• Only Good Indians
• Sour Candy
• Redwall

Description Study Reading List

For my study, I didn’t want to try and tackle all of the books on the reading list because I did want to leave room for doing some writing exercises and the other reading I like outside of studying writing. So, I picked:

Five books to read

1. Game of Thrones
2. The Great Gatsby
3. Wuthering Heights
4. Salt Fat Acid Heat
5. Area X

One book to do some copywork exercises

1. The Matrix (script)

One master study book

1. Station Eleven

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