Ed Champion is a remarkable reader, critic, etc. (feel free to add to the list of how remarkable he is), and in this interview he recommends books for writers.
Ultimately, a novelist’s job — irrespective of whether she is writing speculative fiction or hard realism — is to understand how human behavior emerges from systematic consequence. If you can generate an atmosphere based on systematic consequence, then your novel will likely feel “real” even if it is set in a land populated by dancing elves or talking fruit.
For plot structure, “read Richard Stark.” For great openers, Burgess, Cain, and Murray have good examples.
this week, and I don’t plan to read all of the recipes in the last third of it, but if I get through most of it of the rest, I will consider it read. Other books have only four or five chapters suitable for a particular reader. Can’t that reader consider the book read, once he has read from it? Isn’t thoughtful reading of a portion better than cover-to-cover reading for the sake of it?