How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster
Genre: Nonfiction
Blurb (on back of book):
While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes—of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor. What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower—and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.
MY OPINION: ***
I finished this book for my summer homework assignment for my senior year AP Literature class. I ended up finishing the entire thing in two days, which is fairly impressive for a forced-read. Although I was expecting to find it as boring as most forced-reads, I ended up not hating it as much as I expected, though I did have some issues with the overall premise.
First off, this book came off as very pretentious. After talking to some of my friends and reading online reviews of the book, I have found that many people agree with me on this fact. The writer is an English professor and is obviously very learned in literature but I feel as if the things he was sharing came off as I-am-the-only-person-who-knows-how-to-read-correctly, which I found quite condescending. Many of his tips and tricks were quite useful and I found them to be quite interesting but overall, I didn't like the way that he worded various things, as if everything he was saying was above us all.
The book is also chock full of quotes and summaries of various pieces of literature that pertain to whatever the chapter is about. Rather than hearing a lot about his own ideas, the writer just gives summaries of different books and authors to prove his point. It was as if he was giving all evidence and less-than-enough analysis when writing a literary essay. I would have loved to have understood less about each book and more about the point this author was trying to make within that book. Also, many of these books are from centuries ago or were pieces I had only ever heard of from my sophomore year AP European class in which we studied art and literature from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Additionally, the author constantly repeated the same summaries of the same books over and over again. He mentions Toni Morrison in almost every chapter, it seemed, as well as various other writers such as James Joyce. Obviously these are very acclaimed and wonderful writers but I feel as if there were so many other pieces written in those time periods and in modern times that he could have drawn from, rather than repeating the same examples over and over. On top of that, I read the book from front to back, which I believe is the way you are supposed to (this isn't a textbook or choose-your-own-adventure kind of a thing) but it felt as if he expected you to be reading various chapters that you found interesting; he kept repeating the same old summaries and the same old characters again and again as if we didn't know by now what The Iliad was about or Toni Morrison's Beloved.
However, many of the things this author brought up were things I would have glossed over when reading his various examples. I did like reading about the various symbols and allegories hidden within books, especially in books that I have already read. I found it interesting to see how his analysis compared to my own or to my teacher's analyses, because it highlights how English and literature is fairly subjective, depending on the reader and their style of reading and background knowledge.
I found the vampire chapter fairly interesting because it felt super random and ironic but also made sense in the context of the novel. To sum everything up, the author talks about vampires, rain, water, religion, quests, and sex, six of some of the main things that goes into analyzing literature. I found it quite interesting to read this broad array of topics and see how things intertwined or showed up in various pieces of literature.
Overall, as someone who is about to head in to the hardest English class on my school's campus, I am glad to have this background knowledge from this book when we tackle some of the biggest classics. While I did not enjoy the tone that the author wrote in, I cannot deny that I now know more about literature and reading literature than I did before. I would recommend this book to anyone seeking to read fairly in-depth summaries of various symbols and elements in literature that trained readers should be looking out for; if you are about to take a harder English class, I would recommend reading this book to gain a good amount of background knowledge that will only serve to benefit you when trying to analyze the old English of classic novels.
Main Character: N/A
Sidekick(s): N/A
Villain(s): N/A
Nonfiction Elements: This book was not a work of fiction and is meant to be used as a reference book.
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