What writers should read . . .

John Irving:

There is no one book that students of writing “should” read. With young writers, I tried to focus on the choices you make before you write a novel. The main character and the most important character are not always the same person — you have to know the difference. The first-person voice and the third-person voice each come with advantages and disadvantages; it helps me to know what the story is, and who the characters are, before I choose the point-of-view voice for the storytelling. Two novels I taught a lot were “Cat and Mouse” (Grass) and “The Power and the Glory” or “The Heart of the Matter” (Greene). They were excellent examples of novels about moral dilemmas; I find that young writers are especially interested in moral dilemmas — they’re often struggling to write about those dilemmas. 

NYT interview with John Irving.