>>7278049I'd recommend it to kids, especially lower high school or below. Gardner isn't the best novelist in the world, but he's not an idiot. Reads kind of like a fiction version of "ABCs of Reading" by Ezra Pound -- for example, good opinions like "authors should study and imitate and move on from Joyce, Homer, Melville, Dickens, etc. and ignore bad novelists who have ulterior motives such as Steinbeck." Pretty great opinions for someone who could be tainted otherwise.
If you're not young, just read and take notes from good books. That's literally it.
