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How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide (Paperback)
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- Paperback $12.73
Short Description for How to Read a NovelTakes the reader on a literary journey from the first English novels of three hundred years ago to the present avalanche of ten thousand a year. This title shows that reading a novel is not a spectator sport, but an intense participatory activity. It offers insights into what we read, fresh questions to pose and the means to pursue them.
Full description- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Published: 02 August 2007
- Format: Paperback 288 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Literary Theory | Literary Studies: Fiction, Novelists & Prose Writers
- ISBN 13: 9781861979865 ISBN 10: 186197986X
- Sales rank: 377,360
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Reviews for How to Read a Novel
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Staff review
How to Read a Novel
With so many books being published -- 10,000 a month in general, and 10,000 novels per year, in the UK alone -- there is an understandable urge for books of lists to help us navigate our way through the deluge. Since postmodernism levelled the playing field between high and low art there is, it seems, a palpable nervousness about judging books, so we look to reviewers, critics, book groups, bloggers to help us find our next good read.
John Sutherland is Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a visiting professor at the California Institute of Technology. He has published twenty books (including Is Heathcliff a Murderer? Great Puzzles in 19th Century Fiction and his memoir The Boy who Loved Books) and was chairman of the 2005 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. Surely he can tell us How to Read a Novel and which ones to bother with?
Well, sadly, this is a pretty disappointing book. It doesn't have the charm or the scope of other lists books, like Peter Boxall's handsome 1001 Books: You Must Read Before You Die or Time Out's 1000 Books to Change Your Life, indeed it eschews the role of advocacy from the very beginning and spends most of its pages discussing the mechanics of novels: how the novel arose; why certain titles are chosen over others. Sutherland is pretty good with his brief history of the codex book, and quirky when he tells us what we can learn from copyright pages and the date when a novel was published (pre- and post-publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover after the UK obscenity trial in 1960 is important here). He is wry and amusing, and also very good at gossip, odd literary anecdotes and why book blurbs should be disbelieved. But he never delves deeply enough into any of his subjects to make the case for why we should be diverted by his error-strewn book when they are so many much, much better ones crying out to be read.
by Mark Thwaite
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