How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide by John Sutherland (English) Paperback Book

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"Do we still know how to read a novel?" John Sutherland, Chairman of the 2005 Booker Prize Committee, asks. His answer is an unequivocal, "No." But Sutherland has not given up hope. With acerbic wit and intellect, he traces the history of what it used to mean to be well-read and tells readers what it still means today while reminding readers how the delicate charms of fiction can be at once wonderful and inspired and infuriating. On one level this is a book about novels but at a deeper level, this is a book in which one of the most intimate tete-a-tetes is described—one in which a reader meets a novel. However, in order for the relationship to take its proper course, a reader must know "how" to read it! Sutherland helps readers:—Pick the right book for them among the cattle call of pre-packaged blurbs and enticing cover art—Recognize a misleading title at first glance—Look beyond the politics of book reviewers—Learn to read the extras—epigraphs, forewords, afterwords—to understand themes only hinted at in the main text—Find real aspects of the author cleverly hidden in the narrative structure—And much moreIn a book that is as wry and humorous as it is learned and opinionated, John Sutherland tells you everything you always wanted to know about how to read fiction better than you do now (but, were afraid to ask).

FORMATPaperback LANGUAGEEnglish CONDITIONBrand New Publisher Description

"Do we still know how to read a novel?" John Sutherland, Chairman of the 2005 Booker Prize Committee, asks. His answer is an unequivocal, "No." But Sutherland has not given up hope. With acerbic wit and intellect, he traces the history of what it used to mean to be well-read and tells readers what it still means today while reminding readers how the delicate charms of fiction can be at once wonderful and inspired and infuriating. On one level this is a book about novels but at a deeper level, this is a book in which one of the most intimate tête-à-têtes is described--one in which a reader meets a novel. However, in order for the relationship to take its proper course, a reader must know how to read it! Sutherland helps readers: --Pick the right book for them among the cattle call of pre-packaged blurbs and enticing cover art--Recognize a misleading title at first glance--Look beyond the politics of book reviewers--Learn to read the extras--epigraphs, forewords, afterwords--to understand themes only hinted at in the main text--Find real aspects of the author cleverly hidden in the narrative structure--And much more In a book that is as wry and humorous as it is learned and opinionated, John Sutherland tells you everything you always wanted to know about how to read fiction better than you do now (but, were afraid to ask).

Author Biography

JOHN SUTHERLAND is a professor at University College London who has published and edited numerous books. He writes for The Guardian, The New York Times Book Review, and London Review of Books. He was the 2005 Man Book Prize committee chairman. He lives in London, England.

Review

"How to Read a Novel is a lighthearted, often funny book. And oddly calming. There may not be time to read everything, but at least there is some hope of doing it well." --The Los Angeles Times "A quick and lively view of the novel that mixes practical wisdom and theory...highly recommended." --Library Journal "Informed, wise, witty, urbane, sententious by turns...a relaxing but stimulating read." --Public Library Journal (UK)

Long Description

"Do we still know how to read a novel?" John Sutherland, Chairman of the 2005 Booker Prize Committee, asks. His answer is an unequivocal, "No." But Sutherland has not given up hope. With acerbic wit and intellect, he traces the history of what it used to mean to be well-read and tells readers what it still means today while reminding readers how the delicate charms of fiction can be at once wonderful and inspired and infuriating. On one level this is a book about novels but at a deeper level, this is a book in which one of the most intimate tete-a-tetes is described--one in which a reader meets a novel. However, in order for the relationship to take its proper course, a reader must know "how" to read it! Sutherland helps readers: --Pick the right book for them among the cattle call of pre-packaged blurbs and enticing cover art--Recognize a misleading title at first glance--Look beyond the politics of book reviewers--Learn to read the extras--epigraphs, forewords, afterwords--to understand themes only hinted at in the main text--Find real aspects of the author cleverly hidden in the narrative structure--And much more In a book that is as wry and humorous as it is learned and opinionated, John Sutherland tells you everything you always wanted to know about how to read fiction better than you do now (but, were afraid to ask).

Review Quote

Informed, wise, witty, urbane, sententious by turns...a relaxing but stimulating read.

Description for Reading Group Guide

Tips for Picking the Right Novel... Look Beyond the Propaganda, And Choose For Yourself! Ignore the blurbs and any hints of praise on the cover, those words were designed to entice. Blurbs are often from friends of authors, and any words of praise within the jacket copy, well, quite frankly may have been written by the author. Immediately turn to page 69 and read a bit. It''s easier to tell from a chunk in the middle whether you want to read more than from the first paragraph, even great books can sometimes take more than fifty pages to really get rolling! Don''t judge a book by its...title? Yes, title. The title often has absolutely no relevance to the book whatsoever but is oftentimes just a clever phrasing that looks great in packaging. Then again, sometimes a title says everything about the book. Be aware, or, should that be beware ? A bestseller they say!? Ask yourself, why is it a bestseller? Lists not only record sales, they stimulate sales. Did a book just take off because everyone decided, "Oh my goodness! Everyone else is reading it! I need to catch up!"? A New Essay by John Sutherland I recall one evening walking to the underground with A. S. Byatt, after a day''s teaching. We were both then lecturers in the same English Department. Why, I asked, did she publish so much higher journalism: I couldn''t open a copy of a literary supplement or an opinion-forming magazine without seeing her name. It was great stuff, but why so much? "Because I need shoes," she replied, dryly, "and I like to buy new ones from time to time". She then went off to get her train to Wandsworth. Nowadays the author of Possession could out buy Imelda Marcos---were she so inclined. Probably Wandsworth, too. And when she writes (she still does a lot of it in the prints), I suspect, Dame Antonia now writes for herself: not for shoe-leather. And very well she writes. Most authors'' motives are impure (what was it Byron said: "money, fame, and the love of beautiful women"?) My motives in writing How to Read a Novel were, I admit, mixed. No beautiful women, alas. Shoes? Perhaps. A main motive, the worm in my apple, was embarrassment. Embarrassment, that is, at how little fiction I''ve read, set against the mass there is to read. It''s the familiar "so many novels, so little time" problem. It''s also an insoluble problem. The stuff spills out faster than one can even read the listings of what one will never get round to reading. Every time one logs on to Amazon, there''s another half million---all yours for a click and a flash of plastic. The buying experience has been sped up to nano-seconds. Reading practice is something else: even the most practiced reader of fiction will be doing well to manage a page a minute. One can, of course, as recommended by the witty Frenchman Pierre Bayard, whose Comment parler des livres que l''on na pas lus? (How to Talk about Books one hasn''t Read) was published in 2007, go in for the higher bluffery. Since---as Bayard shrewdly points out---the person (or class) you''re talking to won''t probably have read the book either, you can usually fake it. But, possibly, someone will have read what you haven''t and are talking about, with all the confidence of the consummate un-reader. Sod''s law applies to literary conversation as much as to anything else in life. At one''s back one always hears the whirring of the bullshit meter (is there a French word for "bullshit"? How about "sod''s law"?) How best to invest one''s tiny mite: the (say) 1,001 novels one can read in a lifetime? Our current addiction to "best ever", "must read", "bestseller" lists, charts, and tables reflects that anxiety. This taxonomic desperation originated, literary historians record, in the 1890s, at exactly the same time, as the historians elsewhere record, that the number of new novels produced annually began to overflow the containers society has for them. As a number of reviewers pointed out (some indulgently, others less so) How to Read a Novel did not, in any detail, instruct on how to read, so much as how to position oneself to undertake that act. How, as it were, to close in on the novel, fending off commercial coercion, word-of-mouth seductions, the herd instinct to thunder along behind the crowd---above all, how to dig out the right book from the huge mass available. An ever more massive mass. On the day I''m writing this, Forbes Magazine proclaims last year to have been the richest ever for the human race. I would wager that, for English Language readers, 2006-7 was also the richest- ever year for fiction. And, for a certainty, 2008 will be even richer. This is not merely a function of ever more new novels as the fact that---unlike other products---old novels do not disappear once consumed. Like old soldiers, they never fade away. The must-read archive gets bigger and bigger. Bestseller lists used to contain ten titles. Now it''s up to a hundred. It''s like a mountain which grows faster than any reader can climb. How to be well-read in the 21st century? Can one be well-read? As the sad witness of lottery winners testifies, vast wealth seldom makes life easier. We are, as regards the range, quality, and sheer number of novels available to us in 2007, better off than all generations before us. "Embarrassment" is inadequate to describe the dilemmas this unprecedented richness poses. It is not (as it was in my youth) disposable cash which defines the dilemma as available time. We live longer than did but even if we lasted as long as Swift''s Struldbrugs the reader''s eye would never catch up with the writer''s hand. A related, more intractable, and perennially fascinating issue is why we need so much narrative in our lives. It''s not just novels. Why is it that 100 per cent of what is shown on our cinema screens, over fifty percent on our TV screens is fictional narrative. Even newspaper and magazine articles are sucked, inexorably, to the condition of "stories" with beginnings, middles, and ends. Why, in a life where (as a modern Gradgrind would say) Fact is paramount, hurry incessant, and the real world so pressing do we crave such large, time-wasting, doses of fiction? Dickens, the creator of Gradgrind, proposes one answer: "people muth''t be amuth''d", as the circus-master Sleary (rather too liquidly in my view) insists. Imagination, Dickens argues, must be fed if we are to live full lives: deny that nourishment, and life shrivels. Man does not live by fact alone. One of the novelist''s targets in Hard Times (along with the political economists, the utilitarians, and Preston''s striking textile workers) was the anti-fiction prejudice the newly founded public libraries in Britain. The public library battle has been well won. The novel triumphs on its shelves. But in the interwar years of the 20th century, fiction faced an even sterner cultural test than the stony faced public librarian. How could reading novels justify itself as a university subject? Belletrism---the notion that fictional prose was an art which connoisseurs could relish like fine wine was deemed to be beneath the level of an academic "discipline". Too weak-wristed. Something strenuous was required---as strenuous as Anglo Saxon, or classics. From Cambridge University came a saving strategy---a way of reading novels as "critically" as philologists read Ormulum or chemists turned blue litmus paper red. Fiction the new puritans of reading declared, had two contrary characters. The first (wholly deleterious) was escapist. The novel, like gin, was the shortest way out of Manchester, or wherever. On its wings, little Wellsian people, leading their little lives, could drug themselves into accepting those little lives. The mill-girl, dosing herself with regular drams of romance from Peg''s Paper , or the Kippsian counter-jumper with a "shilling shocker" stuck in his hip pocket was the image associated with this fiction. Critical sneer was the approved dismissive technique. There was, however, another worthier kind of fiction which offered engagement, not escape from the real world. These novels lent readers (the relatively few capable of profiting from the loan) the privilege of sharing a superior sensibility: seeing the real world through other eyes which rendered the world more, not less, real. The trick was to separate one kind of novel from the other. The faculty required, for this operation, was "discrimination". The critical razor, applied to the mass, could find the vein of gold among the mountainous dross. Famously the Leavises, with whom this harsh doctrine is principally associated, found room on their bookshelves for only a yard or two of truly worthwhile works (together with the yard or two of their own---justifying the first yard). The avatar was D. H. Lawrence. The stricter sect of Leavisites held to the belief that after Lawrence, there was nothing. The rim of the fictional universe had been reached with Women in Love . It was an intellectually gratifying, and highly economic doctrine, but radically ungenerous. Those who, like myself, were subjected to it in the decades that its parsimony dominated university study of fiction felt that it left one culturally airless. There was all that activity, elsewhere, which one was prohibited from even thinking about. In recent years more relaxed, and intellectually curious academic disciplines (notably literary sociology, and media studies) have widened the gate from its Leavisian straightness. I have even read answers on Jackie Collins in finals papers, and (many, many) disser

Details ISBN0312359896 Author John Sutherland Short Title HT READ A NOVEL Language English ISBN-10 0312359896 ISBN-13 9780312359898 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 808.307 Year 2007 Residence US Affiliation University College, London Subtitle A User's Guide DOI 10.1604/9780312359898 Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2007-09-18 NZ Release Date 2007-09-18 US Release Date 2007-09-18 UK Release Date 2007-09-18 Pages 272 Publisher St Martin's Press Publication Date 2007-09-18 Imprint St Martin's Press Illustrations Illustrations Audience General We've got this

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