Horrible, 19 Nov 2008
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.

Indispensable for the novelist, 14 Dec 2007
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

Interesting and insightful, 09 Jul 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Interesting and insightful, 23 Jun 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Modest and magisterial, 25 Sep 2006
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

Horrible, 19 Nov 2008
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.

Indispensable for the novelist, 14 Dec 2007
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

Interesting and insightful, 09 Jul 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Interesting and insightful, 23 Jun 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Modest and magisterial, 25 Sep 2006
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

Higher literacy, 29 Dec 2005
Imagine me - there I was, for decades of my life, thinking I knew how to read a book. I'd advanced through elementary school and prep, into college and finally to graduate school when I discovered, to my horror, that I in fact did not know how to read! Perhaps that helps to explain my affinity to literacy programmes, with whom I will begin working again come this Wednesday.

But no, perhaps I overstate the situation. What I actually mean to say is that it was not until my graduate school days that I happened across the most excellent work How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. This staple had somehow eluded me; familiar as I was with both Adler and Van Doren, I had never encountered this text.

This book was written in 1940, as World War II was beginning and the Great Depression ending; it was revised in the 60s and again in 70s, with the assistance of Charles Van Doren, another person who had had some difficult dealings with Columbia, due to his involvement in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Van Doren moved away from the East Coast and landed in Chicago, near Adler, at Britannica, also again near Adler, and has the kind of intellect and unconventional circumstance that Adler admired. Adler of course had his own unique academic career, failing to get an undergraduate degree due to a physical education requirement that went unmet.

The book itself is divided into four main sections with two sizeable appendices.

The Dimensions of Reading
In this section, the authors look as types of reading and reading levels. They look at basic goals for reading, and discuss different types of learning. While they do not get into the theoretical complexities of learning styles as intricately as more recent educational theorists, they do make interesting and insightful distinctions between learning by instruction and learning by discovery.

This section is, in fact, full of rules. Rules for notetaking, annotating (highlighting, underlining, summarising, etc.), skimming, comprehending, etc. are all presented in an almost overwhelming sequence. There is so much to remember while reading (and I remember how smug I felt at having discovered many, if not most, of the rules on my own). But the authors beg for the rules to be consistently applied so that they merge together to become simple habit. They use the analogy of learning to ski - the rules are important, each in and of itself, but successful skiing transcends a mere application of rules until they become a natural impulse. So it is with reading.

Analytical Reading
This is crucial for true benefit and comprehension of any book. The authors talk about analysis in stages:

o Pigeonholing a book
o X-raying a book
o Coming to terms with an author
o Determining an author's message
o Criticising a book fairly
o Agreeing or disagreeing with an author
o Aids to reading

Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
In this section, the authors look at critical differences between different styles of books. It is obvious to even the inexperienced reader that reading a technical manual is vastly different from reading plays, poems, or history texts. Even the most educated of people occasionally stumble when confronted with high-level material from outside fields, such as asking the social scientist to deal with mathematical and scientific texts, or asking the physicist to deal with history and psychology treatises. One might argue about their divisions, but within the chapters they cover a very broad area.

The Ultimate Goals of Reading
Why does anyone read in the first place? Here the authors talk about developing beyond individual books into fields of learning, introducing ideas of synoptic reading and understanding the importance for doing so. Again charting rules of engagement for multiple texts, the authors discuss the importance of reading for understanding and deeper comprehension.

* * *

The first appendix consists of a lengthy list of the great books identified by Adler, modified over time by the various people involved in great books curriculum development. This is an admittedly Western-dominated list.
The list is certainly a long one. There are 137 authors, often with several works attached, recommended in this list. One can find this list in physical form in the Great Books series that is a companion to the Britannica. Itself only recently updated and revised, it consists of several linear feet of bookshelves, and even their recommended 10-year plan is ambition and doesn't cover the entirety of the series. The list is presented (as the book set is organized) in chronological order; this is not the best order in which to read the works.

The second appendix is actually a series of reading exercises for self-examination or group consideration. These are designed to be used for different levels of readers and different intentions. The authors tackle the question of arbitrary and cultural bias in manners of testing, coming to the pragmatic conclusion that, so long as academic and society advancement is tied to these kinds of testing and evaluations, it makes sense to learn how to do them, and however biased they may be in form or content, they still do provide a good measure, if not the best possible measure, for reading comprehension and retention.

One can tell that one's book has been successful when parody versions begin to appear. The year after the first edition of How to Read a Book appeared, there was the spoof How to Read Two Books; shortly thereafter there was a serious monograph by a Professor I.A. Richards entitled How to Read a Page.

Happy reading!

A Prequel to all books, 20 Dec 2005
This book is a must read for anyone who is serious about his/her reading. The authors offer some perceptive tips, suggestions and ideas that are aimed at helping the average person imporve his/her reading skill. This is a book for graduate students who need the best 'how to' techniques to help them get the most out of their reading. This is also a book for the serious reader who is not content with turning page after page - going through the mechanical motions of reading. This is a book for anyone who believes that reading a book is a small life-changing exercise.

The authors begin by distinguishing between 4 levels of reading and provide techniques and examples for each level. What I found to be especially interesting are the chapters on how to read the different subjects: The authors introduce a single methodolgy for effective reading and then proceed to customize it for reading books on the sciences, philosophy, literature, fiction, etc.

Even if you consider yourself an effective reader, you'll be surprised at some of the insights that you will receive from this book. This is an excellent book, well written and well researched and it should be on every reader's shelf.

Brilliant., 26 Jun 1999
This book is one of the best books I have read, and it has exerted immense influence on me. I now read actively -- I mean, as much as possible -- and can feel how much more I am gaining from reading. The book has shown me the way to life-long learning.

This Book Has Changed The Way I Read, 04 Jun 1999
Frankly, though I have been a book reader for many years, I can say that I have always been reading the "wrong kinds" of books until I read this book. It has helped me to widen my scope in readings as well as expanding my mind! It is a must have and more important a must read book. Highly Recommended. It will forever change the way you read and your reading life will never be the same again.

A MUST share and MUST have resource, 19 Apr 1999
I work in the computer field and constantly need to keep up with the latest technology by reading technical manuals and periodicals. How to Read a Book has given me a sound approach and blueprint to follow as I read these technical documents.

This book is truly a MUST have for everyone of all disciplines.

Horrible, 19 Nov 2008
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.

Indispensable for the novelist, 14 Dec 2007
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

Interesting and insightful, 09 Jul 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Interesting and insightful, 23 Jun 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Modest and magisterial, 25 Sep 2006
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

Higher literacy, 29 Dec 2005
Imagine me - there I was, for decades of my life, thinking I knew how to read a book. I'd advanced through elementary school and prep, into college and finally to graduate school when I discovered, to my horror, that I in fact did not know how to read! Perhaps that helps to explain my affinity to literacy programmes, with whom I will begin working again come this Wednesday.

But no, perhaps I overstate the situation. What I actually mean to say is that it was not until my graduate school days that I happened across the most excellent work How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. This staple had somehow eluded me; familiar as I was with both Adler and Van Doren, I had never encountered this text.

This book was written in 1940, as World War II was beginning and the Great Depression ending; it was revised in the 60s and again in 70s, with the assistance of Charles Van Doren, another person who had had some difficult dealings with Columbia, due to his involvement in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Van Doren moved away from the East Coast and landed in Chicago, near Adler, at Britannica, also again near Adler, and has the kind of intellect and unconventional circumstance that Adler admired. Adler of course had his own unique academic career, failing to get an undergraduate degree due to a physical education requirement that went unmet.

The book itself is divided into four main sections with two sizeable appendices.

The Dimensions of Reading
In this section, the authors look as types of reading and reading levels. They look at basic goals for reading, and discuss different types of learning. While they do not get into the theoretical complexities of learning styles as intricately as more recent educational theorists, they do make interesting and insightful distinctions between learning by instruction and learning by discovery.

This section is, in fact, full of rules. Rules for notetaking, annotating (highlighting, underlining, summarising, etc.), skimming, comprehending, etc. are all presented in an almost overwhelming sequence. There is so much to remember while reading (and I remember how smug I felt at having discovered many, if not most, of the rules on my own). But the authors beg for the rules to be consistently applied so that they merge together to become simple habit. They use the analogy of learning to ski - the rules are important, each in and of itself, but successful skiing transcends a mere application of rules until they become a natural impulse. So it is with reading.

Analytical Reading
This is crucial for true benefit and comprehension of any book. The authors talk about analysis in stages:

o Pigeonholing a book
o X-raying a book
o Coming to terms with an author
o Determining an author's message
o Criticising a book fairly
o Agreeing or disagreeing with an author
o Aids to reading

Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
In this section, the authors look at critical differences between different styles of books. It is obvious to even the inexperienced reader that reading a technical manual is vastly different from reading plays, poems, or history texts. Even the most educated of people occasionally stumble when confronted with high-level material from outside fields, such as asking the social scientist to deal with mathematical and scientific texts, or asking the physicist to deal with history and psychology treatises. One might argue about their divisions, but within the chapters they cover a very broad area.

The Ultimate Goals of Reading
Why does anyone read in the first place? Here the authors talk about developing beyond individual books into fields of learning, introducing ideas of synoptic reading and understanding the importance for doing so. Again charting rules of engagement for multiple texts, the authors discuss the importance of reading for understanding and deeper comprehension.

* * *

The first appendix consists of a lengthy list of the great books identified by Adler, modified over time by the various people involved in great books curriculum development. This is an admittedly Western-dominated list.
The list is certainly a long one. There are 137 authors, often with several works attached, recommended in this list. One can find this list in physical form in the Great Books series that is a companion to the Britannica. Itself only recently updated and revised, it consists of several linear feet of bookshelves, and even their recommended 10-year plan is ambition and doesn't cover the entirety of the series. The list is presented (as the book set is organized) in chronological order; this is not the best order in which to read the works.

The second appendix is actually a series of reading exercises for self-examination or group consideration. These are designed to be used for different levels of readers and different intentions. The authors tackle the question of arbitrary and cultural bias in manners of testing, coming to the pragmatic conclusion that, so long as academic and society advancement is tied to these kinds of testing and evaluations, it makes sense to learn how to do them, and however biased they may be in form or content, they still do provide a good measure, if not the best possible measure, for reading comprehension and retention.

One can tell that one's book has been successful when parody versions begin to appear. The year after the first edition of How to Read a Book appeared, there was the spoof How to Read Two Books; shortly thereafter there was a serious monograph by a Professor I.A. Richards entitled How to Read a Page.

Happy reading!

A Prequel to all books, 20 Dec 2005
This book is a must read for anyone who is serious about his/her reading. The authors offer some perceptive tips, suggestions and ideas that are aimed at helping the average person imporve his/her reading skill. This is a book for graduate students who need the best 'how to' techniques to help them get the most out of their reading. This is also a book for the serious reader who is not content with turning page after page - going through the mechanical motions of reading. This is a book for anyone who believes that reading a book is a small life-changing exercise.

The authors begin by distinguishing between 4 levels of reading and provide techniques and examples for each level. What I found to be especially interesting are the chapters on how to read the different subjects: The authors introduce a single methodolgy for effective reading and then proceed to customize it for reading books on the sciences, philosophy, literature, fiction, etc.

Even if you consider yourself an effective reader, you'll be surprised at some of the insights that you will receive from this book. This is an excellent book, well written and well researched and it should be on every reader's shelf.

Brilliant., 26 Jun 1999
This book is one of the best books I have read, and it has exerted immense influence on me. I now read actively -- I mean, as much as possible -- and can feel how much more I am gaining from reading. The book has shown me the way to life-long learning.

This Book Has Changed The Way I Read, 04 Jun 1999
Frankly, though I have been a book reader for many years, I can say that I have always been reading the "wrong kinds" of books until I read this book. It has helped me to widen my scope in readings as well as expanding my mind! It is a must have and more important a must read book. Highly Recommended. It will forever change the way you read and your reading life will never be the same again.

A MUST share and MUST have resource, 19 Apr 1999
I work in the computer field and constantly need to keep up with the latest technology by reading technical manuals and periodicals. How to Read a Book has given me a sound approach and blueprint to follow as I read these technical documents.

This book is truly a MUST have for everyone of all disciplines.

A great resource, 13 Nov 2008
It doesn't matter if your book club is starting or well established, everyone can get something out of this slim book.

It starts with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, a note from the editor and then a note from a book club member. Then it packs in about 100 books in detail and 14 top ten themes (British & American Classics; World classics; Quick Reads; Challenging Reads; Men's Books; Non-Fiction Books; Books with a Younger Persepective; Humourous Reads; War Books; Crime Books; Gay Reads; Cult Classics; Sci-Fi books and Chilling Reads).

In the detailed pages it has, the book length and year published; a non-spoilered synopsis; Reader and/or Critics opinions; Discussion points; Background info and Companion Books. The questions made me think for the ones I had read and some of them made me want to get my hands on those I haven't.

The range of choices is good, everything from Rebecca to Light a Penny Candle and it's arranged by author. The editors decided to limit themselves to one book per author but as a starting point it's an excellent resource!

The Book Club Bible, 09 Jul 2008
The book I didn't know I needed but now can't imagine how I managed without! For book clubs it is a must, for anyone who wishes to broaden their reading experience it is a fantastic place to begin. A brilliant stocking filler!

Finally! an easy way to pick your next book club book, 03 Jul 2008
I bought this book as it was such a clever idea. The reality is even better, giving you a taste of hundreds of books that you'd never realised that you wanted to read/ had forgotten about. Useful not just for bookclub members but anyone with a regular commute looking for something new to read. Highly recommended.

Horrible, 19 Nov 2008
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.

Indispensable for the novelist, 14 Dec 2007
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

Interesting and insightful, 09 Jul 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Interesting and insightful, 23 Jun 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Modest and magisterial, 25 Sep 2006
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

Higher literacy, 29 Dec 2005
Imagine me - there I was, for decades of my life, thinking I knew how to read a book. I'd advanced through elementary school and prep, into college and finally to graduate school when I discovered, to my horror, that I in fact did not know how to read! Perhaps that helps to explain my affinity to literacy programmes, with whom I will begin working again come this Wednesday.

But no, perhaps I overstate the situation. What I actually mean to say is that it was not until my graduate school days that I happened across the most excellent work How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. This staple had somehow eluded me; familiar as I was with both Adler and Van Doren, I had never encountered this text.

This book was written in 1940, as World War II was beginning and the Great Depression ending; it was revised in the 60s and again in 70s, with the assistance of Charles Van Doren, another person who had had some difficult dealings with Columbia, due to his involvement in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Van Doren moved away from the East Coast and landed in Chicago, near Adler, at Britannica, also again near Adler, and has the kind of intellect and unconventional circumstance that Adler admired. Adler of course had his own unique academic career, failing to get an undergraduate degree due to a physical education requirement that went unmet.

The book itself is divided into four main sections with two sizeable appendices.

The Dimensions of Reading
In this section, the authors look as types of reading and reading levels. They look at basic goals for reading, and discuss different types of learning. While they do not get into the theoretical complexities of learning styles as intricately as more recent educational theorists, they do make interesting and insightful distinctions between learning by instruction and learning by discovery.

This section is, in fact, full of rules. Rules for notetaking, annotating (highlighting, underlining, summarising, etc.), skimming, comprehending, etc. are all presented in an almost overwhelming sequence. There is so much to remember while reading (and I remember how smug I felt at having discovered many, if not most, of the rules on my own). But the authors beg for the rules to be consistently applied so that they merge together to become simple habit. They use the analogy of learning to ski - the rules are important, each in and of itself, but successful skiing transcends a mere application of rules until they become a natural impulse. So it is with reading.

Analytical Reading
This is crucial for true benefit and comprehension of any book. The authors talk about analysis in stages:

o Pigeonholing a book
o X-raying a book
o Coming to terms with an author
o Determining an author's message
o Criticising a book fairly
o Agreeing or disagreeing with an author
o Aids to reading

Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
In this section, the authors look at critical differences between different styles of books. It is obvious to even the inexperienced reader that reading a technical manual is vastly different from reading plays, poems, or history texts. Even the most educated of people occasionally stumble when confronted with high-level material from outside fields, such as asking the social scientist to deal with mathematical and scientific texts, or asking the physicist to deal with history and psychology treatises. One might argue about their divisions, but within the chapters they cover a very broad area.

The Ultimate Goals of Reading
Why does anyone read in the first place? Here the authors talk about developing beyond individual books into fields of learning, introducing ideas of synoptic reading and understanding the importance for doing so. Again charting rules of engagement for multiple texts, the authors discuss the importance of reading for understanding and deeper comprehension.

* * *

The first appendix consists of a lengthy list of the great books identified by Adler, modified over time by the various people involved in great books curriculum development. This is an admittedly Western-dominated list.
The list is certainly a long one. There are 137 authors, often with several works attached, recommended in this list. One can find this list in physical form in the Great Books series that is a companion to the Britannica. Itself only recently updated and revised, it consists of several linear feet of bookshelves, and even their recommended 10-year plan is ambition and doesn't cover the entirety of the series. The list is presented (as the book set is organized) in chronological order; this is not the best order in which to read the works.

The second appendix is actually a series of reading exercises for self-examination or group consideration. These are designed to be used for different levels of readers and different intentions. The authors tackle the question of arbitrary and cultural bias in manners of testing, coming to the pragmatic conclusion that, so long as academic and society advancement is tied to these kinds of testing and evaluations, it makes sense to learn how to do them, and however biased they may be in form or content, they still do provide a good measure, if not the best possible measure, for reading comprehension and retention.

One can tell that one's book has been successful when parody versions begin to appear. The year after the first edition of How to Read a Book appeared, there was the spoof How to Read Two Books; shortly thereafter there was a serious monograph by a Professor I.A. Richards entitled How to Read a Page.

Happy reading!

A Prequel to all books, 20 Dec 2005
This book is a must read for anyone who is serious about his/her reading. The authors offer some perceptive tips, suggestions and ideas that are aimed at helping the average person imporve his/her reading skill. This is a book for graduate students who need the best 'how to' techniques to help them get the most out of their reading. This is also a book for the serious reader who is not content with turning page after page - going through the mechanical motions of reading. This is a book for anyone who believes that reading a book is a small life-changing exercise.

The authors begin by distinguishing between 4 levels of reading and provide techniques and examples for each level. What I found to be especially interesting are the chapters on how to read the different subjects: The authors introduce a single methodolgy for effective reading and then proceed to customize it for reading books on the sciences, philosophy, literature, fiction, etc.

Even if you consider yourself an effective reader, you'll be surprised at some of the insights that you will receive from this book. This is an excellent book, well written and well researched and it should be on every reader's shelf.

Brilliant., 26 Jun 1999
This book is one of the best books I have read, and it has exerted immense influence on me. I now read actively -- I mean, as much as possible -- and can feel how much more I am gaining from reading. The book has shown me the way to life-long learning.

This Book Has Changed The Way I Read, 04 Jun 1999
Frankly, though I have been a book reader for many years, I can say that I have always been reading the "wrong kinds" of books until I read this book. It has helped me to widen my scope in readings as well as expanding my mind! It is a must have and more important a must read book. Highly Recommended. It will forever change the way you read and your reading life will never be the same again.

A MUST share and MUST have resource, 19 Apr 1999
I work in the computer field and constantly need to keep up with the latest technology by reading technical manuals and periodicals. How to Read a Book has given me a sound approach and blueprint to follow as I read these technical documents.

This book is truly a MUST have for everyone of all disciplines.

A great resource, 13 Nov 2008
It doesn't matter if your book club is starting or well established, everyone can get something out of this slim book.

It starts with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, a note from the editor and then a note from a book club member. Then it packs in about 100 books in detail and 14 top ten themes (British & American Classics; World classics; Quick Reads; Challenging Reads; Men's Books; Non-Fiction Books; Books with a Younger Persepective; Humourous Reads; War Books; Crime Books; Gay Reads; Cult Classics; Sci-Fi books and Chilling Reads).

In the detailed pages it has, the book length and year published; a non-spoilered synopsis; Reader and/or Critics opinions; Discussion points; Background info and Companion Books. The questions made me think for the ones I had read and some of them made me want to get my hands on those I haven't.

The range of choices is good, everything from Rebecca to Light a Penny Candle and it's arranged by author. The editors decided to limit themselves to one book per author but as a starting point it's an excellent resource!

The Book Club Bible, 09 Jul 2008
The book I didn't know I needed but now can't imagine how I managed without! For book clubs it is a must, for anyone who wishes to broaden their reading experience it is a fantastic place to begin. A brilliant stocking filler!

Finally! an easy way to pick your next book club book, 03 Jul 2008
I bought this book as it was such a clever idea. The reality is even better, giving you a taste of hundreds of books that you'd never realised that you wanted to read/ had forgotten about. Useful not just for bookclub members but anyone with a regular commute looking for something new to read. Highly recommended.

Why Not Catch Him?, 30 Jan 2008
The title should be why not Catch 18, as it is made clear that that was the number chosen by Heller as a title up until the publisher with deeper thinking and subtlty gave us the title which became a well known (and according to Heller) misused phrase. That is one of the high points of this ragtag colllection of titular explanantions. One should ask: Why not Lord of the Hobbits? or Catcher in the Maize? These books however, are not included. What is her eis only that which has a story behind it. At least a partly verifiable story.
It is a mine of (useless) information. The pseudonymes of the 3 Bronte sisters and their first book of published poems and when they died, and some of their influences are all to be found in one chapter. Then there is Moby Dick and the first Sherlock Holmes story, stolen from Edgar Allen Poe; perhaps? Tnhere is, unlike sherlock Holmes, lots of conjecture and little in the way of facts for most of the chapters, except C.S.Lewis, one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century and accountable about his written works. He answers a young enquirers question about Aslan in this way:
Has there never been anyone in this world who(1.) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas.(2.) Said he was the son of the Great Emperor.(3.) Gave himself up for someone else's fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people.(4.) Came to life again.(5.) Is sometimes spoken of as a lamb (see the end of the Dawn Treader). Don't you really know His name in this world. Think it over and let me know the answer!
Then there is Marie Stopes's book about married sex. It turns out that she would have been appalled that her name is now attached to abortion clinics and the rights of homosexuals. All very interesting though.
Finally, the banality of most of the stories is amusing. A clockwork Orange was probably derived from nothing more subversive that a Terry's Chocolate Orange!


Catchy title, 04 Jan 2008
An engaging and interesting book on the history behind various literary works. The authors chooses 50 titles, from ancient Greece to modern day USA and shows how the works came to be called the way they are. As the original articles come from a regular newspaper column, one can delightfully pick and choose excerpts at random. My own favourite is the article on why it is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and not say Catch-14.

Why Not Catch 21?, 21 Oct 2007
A fantastic read, both interestingly factual and compelling. I would reccomend this to anybody with even the slightest taste of great non-fiction. Gary Dexter's, Why Not Catch 21 is a must. This is one of the books you hsve to read before you die. I am eagerly awaiting a sequel or more of his great writing. Bravo.

It is hard to identify what is most valuable about Simon Mason's Rough Guide to Classic Novels. It is, first and foremost, an astonishingly comprehensive guide to the very best in world literature, as ready to celebrate a quirky modern novel as it is to extol the virtues of a masterpiece of the past. It is also an extremely utilitarian resource: if you want to identify and track down one of the great books (which may be familiar to you only by reputation), the chances are good that it will be within these 370-odd pages (though, at times, the highly personal (even eccentric) choice of novels will surprise -- and give pause to -- some readers). But perhaps the greatest value of this compact yet information-packed guide is the absolutely irresistible impulse it stirs in the reader to grab handfuls of the books mentioned and consume them again (or, for that matter, todevour for the first time a celebrated novel that you have been feeling guilty about not reading).

Mason's literary erudition is jawdropping, and the coverage broad (from Tolstoy to Doris Lessing, and from Jane Austen to Raymond Chandler - the book at times overlaps with the same publisher's Rough Guide to Crime Fiction). Combine all this with the highly accessible (but always apposite) analyses and breakdowns of the books discussed, and it's hard to imagine the enterprise being surpassed.

Of course, the Rough Guide imprint prides itself on its edgy, unstuffy approach, and the subject of classic literary fiction must have presented quite a challenge to Mason and his editor Joe Staines; in a dumbed-down age, the guide is a consummate demonstration that it is possible to celebrate the finest achievements of the human race in the arts and humanities without couching them in forbidding academic language. The sidebars and diversions shoehorned in here (including `Sex, Censorship and the Novel', `Outsiders' and a section on vampire fiction called `Literary Bloodsuckers') give a particular pleasure, as do the pithy and highly opinionated squibs on film and TV adaptations of many of the great books included here.

Like many entries in the Rough Guide series, however, there should be a warning on the jacket: reading this guide is going to cost you a lot of small change plugging those gaps in your library. --Barry Forshaw

Horrible, 19 Nov 2008
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.

Indispensable for the novelist, 14 Dec 2007
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

Interesting and insightful, 09 Jul 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Interesting and insightful, 23 Jun 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Modest and magisterial, 25 Sep 2006
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

Higher literacy, 29 Dec 2005
Imagine me - there I was, for decades of my life, thinking I knew how to read a book. I'd advanced through elementary school and prep, into college and finally to graduate school when I discovered, to my horror, that I in fact did not know how to read! Perhaps that helps to explain my affinity to literacy programmes, with whom I will begin working again come this Wednesday.

But no, perhaps I overstate the situation. What I actually mean to say is that it was not until my graduate school days that I happened across the most excellent work How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. This staple had somehow eluded me; familiar as I was with both Adler and Van Doren, I had never encountered this text.

This book was written in 1940, as World War II was beginning and the Great Depression ending; it was revised in the 60s and again in 70s, with the assistance of Charles Van Doren, another person who had had some difficult dealings with Columbia, due to his involvement in the quiz show scandals of the 1950s. Van Doren moved away from the East Coast and landed in Chicago, near Adler, at Britannica, also again near Adler, and has the kind of intellect and unconventional circumstance that Adler admired. Adler of course had his own unique academic career, failing to get an undergraduate degree due to a physical education requirement that went unmet.

The book itself is divided into four main sections with two sizeable appendices.

The Dimensions of Reading
In this section, the authors look as types of reading and reading levels. They look at basic goals for reading, and discuss different types of learning. While they do not get into the theoretical complexities of learning styles as intricately as more recent educational theorists, they do make interesting and insightful distinctions between learning by instruction and learning by discovery.

This section is, in fact, full of rules. Rules for notetaking, annotating (highlighting, underlining, summarising, etc.), skimming, comprehending, etc. are all presented in an almost overwhelming sequence. There is so much to remember while reading (and I remember how smug I felt at having discovered many, if not most, of the rules on my own). But the authors beg for the rules to be consistently applied so that they merge together to become simple habit. They use the analogy of learning to ski - the rules are important, each in and of itself, but successful skiing transcends a mere application of rules until they become a natural impulse. So it is with reading.

Analytical Reading
This is crucial for true benefit and comprehension of any book. The authors talk about analysis in stages:

o Pigeonholing a book
o X-raying a book
o Coming to terms with an author
o Determining an author's message
o Criticising a book fairly
o Agreeing or disagreeing with an author
o Aids to reading

Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
In this section, the authors look at critical differences between different styles of books. It is obvious to even the inexperienced reader that reading a technical manual is vastly different from reading plays, poems, or history texts. Even the most educated of people occasionally stumble when confronted with high-level material from outside fields, such as asking the social scientist to deal with mathematical and scientific texts, or asking the physicist to deal with history and psychology treatises. One might argue about their divisions, but within the chapters they cover a very broad area.

The Ultimate Goals of Reading
Why does anyone read in the first place? Here the authors talk about developing beyond individual books into fields of learning, introducing ideas of synoptic reading and understanding the importance for doing so. Again charting rules of engagement for multiple texts, the authors discuss the importance of reading for understanding and deeper comprehension.

* * *

The first appendix consists of a lengthy list of the great books identified by Adler, modified over time by the various people involved in great books curriculum development. This is an admittedly Western-dominated list.
The list is certainly a long one. There are 137 authors, often with several works attached, recommended in this list. One can find this list in physical form in the Great Books series that is a companion to the Britannica. Itself only recently updated and revised, it consists of several linear feet of bookshelves, and even their recommended 10-year plan is ambition and doesn't cover the entirety of the series. The list is presented (as the book set is organized) in chronological order; this is not the best order in which to read the works.

The second appendix is actually a series of reading exercises for self-examination or group consideration. These are designed to be used for different levels of readers and different intentions. The authors tackle the question of arbitrary and cultural bias in manners of testing, coming to the pragmatic conclusion that, so long as academic and society advancement is tied to these kinds of testing and evaluations, it makes sense to learn how to do them, and however biased they may be in form or content, they still do provide a good measure, if not the best possible measure, for reading comprehension and retention.

One can tell that one's book has been successful when parody versions begin to appear. The year after the first edition of How to Read a Book appeared, there was the spoof How to Read Two Books; shortly thereafter there was a serious monograph by a Professor I.A. Richards entitled How to Read a Page.

Happy reading!

A Prequel to all books, 20 Dec 2005
This book is a must read for anyone who is serious about his/her reading. The authors offer some perceptive tips, suggestions and ideas that are aimed at helping the average person imporve his/her reading skill. This is a book for graduate students who need the best 'how to' techniques to help them get the most out of their reading. This is also a book for the serious reader who is not content with turning page after page - going through the mechanical motions of reading. This is a book for anyone who believes that reading a book is a small life-changing exercise.

The authors begin by distinguishing between 4 levels of reading and provide techniques and examples for each level. What I found to be especially interesting are the chapters on how to read the different subjects: The authors introduce a single methodolgy for effective reading and then proceed to customize it for reading books on the sciences, philosophy, literature, fiction, etc.

Even if you consider yourself an effective reader, you'll be surprised at some of the insights that you will receive from this book. This is an excellent book, well written and well researched and it should be on every reader's shelf.

Brilliant., 26 Jun 1999
This book is one of the best books I have read, and it has exerted immense influence on me. I now read actively -- I mean, as much as possible -- and can feel how much more I am gaining from reading. The book has shown me the way to life-long learning.

This Book Has Changed The Way I Read, 04 Jun 1999
Frankly, though I have been a book reader for many years, I can say that I have always been reading the "wrong kinds" of books until I read this book. It has helped me to widen my scope in readings as well as expanding my mind! It is a must have and more important a must read book. Highly Recommended. It will forever change the way you read and your reading life will never be the same again.

A MUST share and MUST have resource, 19 Apr 1999
I work in the computer field and constantly need to keep up with the latest technology by reading technical manuals and periodicals. How to Read a Book has given me a sound approach and blueprint to follow as I read these technical documents.

This book is truly a MUST have for everyone of all disciplines.

A great resource, 13 Nov 2008
It doesn't matter if your book club is starting or well established, everyone can get something out of this slim book.

It starts with an introduction by Lionel Shriver, a note from the editor and then a note from a book club member. Then it packs in about 100 books in detail and 14 top ten themes (British & American Classics; World classics; Quick Reads; Challenging Reads; Men's Books; Non-Fiction Books; Books with a Younger Persepective; Humourous Reads; War Books; Crime Books; Gay Reads; Cult Classics; Sci-Fi books and Chilling Reads).

In the detailed pages it has, the book length and year published; a non-spoilered synopsis; Reader and/or Critics opinions; Discussion points; Background info and Companion Books. The questions made me think for the ones I had read and some of them made me want to get my hands on those I haven't.

The range of choices is good, everything from Rebecca to Light a Penny Candle and it's arranged by author. The editors decided to limit themselves to one book per author but as a starting point it's an excellent resource!

The Book Club Bible, 09 Jul 2008
The book I didn't know I needed but now can't imagine how I managed without! For book clubs it is a must, for anyone who wishes to broaden their reading experience it is a fantastic place to begin. A brilliant stocking filler!

Finally! an easy way to pick your next book club book, 03 Jul 2008
I bought this book as it was such a clever idea. The reality is even better, giving you a taste of hundreds of books that you'd never realised that you wanted to read/ had forgotten about. Useful not just for bookclub members but anyone with a regular commute looking for something new to read. Highly recommended.

Why Not Catch Him?, 30 Jan 2008
The title should be why not Catch 18, as it is made clear that that was the number chosen by Heller as a title up until the publisher with deeper thinking and subtlty gave us the title which became a well known (and according to Heller) misused phrase. That is one of the high points of this ragtag colllection of titular explanantions. One should ask: Why not Lord of the Hobbits? or Catcher in the Maize? These books however, are not included. What is her eis only that which has a story behind it. At least a partly verifiable story.
It is a mine of (useless) information. The pseudonymes of the 3 Bronte sisters and their first book of published poems and when they died, and some of their influences are all to be found in one chapter. Then there is Moby Dick and the first Sherlock Holmes story, stolen from Edgar Allen Poe; perhaps? Tnhere is, unlike sherlock Holmes, lots of conjecture and little in the way of facts for most of the chapters, except C.S.Lewis, one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century and accountable about his written works. He answers a young enquirers question about Aslan in this way:
Has there never been anyone in this world who(1.) Arrived at the same time as Father Christmas.(2.) Said he was the son of the Great Emperor.(3.) Gave himself up for someone else's fault to be jeered at and killed by wicked people.(4.) Came to life again.(5.) Is sometimes spoken of as a lamb (see the end of the Dawn Treader). Don't you really know His name in this world. Think it over and let me know the answer!
Then there is Marie Stopes's book about married sex. It turns out that she would have been appalled that her name is now attached to abortion clinics and the rights of homosexuals. All very interesting though.
Finally, the banality of most of the stories is amusing. A clockwork Orange was probably derived from nothing more subversive that a Terry's Chocolate Orange!


Catchy title, 04 Jan 2008
An engaging and interesting book on the history behind various literary works. The authors chooses 50 titles, from ancient Greece to modern day USA and shows how the works came to be called the way they are. As the original articles come from a regular newspaper column, one can delightfully pick and choose excerpts at random. My own favourite is the article on why it is Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and not say Catch-14.

Why Not Catch 21?, 21 Oct 2007
A fantastic read, both interestingly factual and compelling. I would reccomend this to anybody with even the slightest taste of great non-fiction. Gary Dexter's, Why Not Catch 21 is a must. This is one of the books you hsve to read before you die. I am eagerly awaiting a sequel or more of his great writing. Bravo.

An Essential for Everyone's Shelf, and Pocket!, 25 Oct 2008

5.0 out of 5 stars An Essential for Every Bookshelf, August 23, 2008

Creating a guide to Classic Novels would seem to be an impossible task, yet Simon Mason has produced a superb book that reaches far and wide - and yet it wears its considerable learning lightly. It's a breathtaking book, truly, yet it never makes you feel overwhelmed. This has in great measure to do with the descriptive sections on the books, which are so engagingly written that they made me want to go out immediately and purchase the books, since it was clear I'd missed a lot of good stuff in my reading life.

The book is cleverly divided into themes, such as Love, Family, War and so on, and includes novels by non-English language writers. Next to each entry is a 'where to go next' and 'screen adaptations' section, both of which are hugely useful, and thoroughly intelligent.

I suspect that many people don't ever get to read the classics because they have no idea what they are. They get turned off by reading Dickens when they're eight and they assume that there are no other classics. This book can change that, and inspire any reader, young or old. I promise you you will find yourself introduced to many authors whose works you may not have thought about, or even known about, and there's not a dud in the bunch. I'm sure some people will miss a favorite author here or there, but remember, this is a guide - it will show you what you really need to know in broad terms and it does not aim to include everything. That's part of its charm. It'll show you the really good stuff and allow you to by-pass those novels by famous authors that, well, are not their finest work.

It's a delicious book; small, compact, fits easily in a pocket, and its full of excellent things. I'm getting some more copies as gifts for a bunch of people. Hey, they'll actually thank me for this gift!

Dr. Allan G. Hunter
author of 'Stories We Need To Know' and 'The Six Archetypes of Love'


A great read in itself, 15 May 2008
A surprisingly enjoyable read in its own right. It feels like browsing through a gorgeous catalogue of enticing book goodies. The selection is unusual in places, but means it takes the hard work out of searching for worthwhile reads off the beaten track.

Compact yet providing great ideas for reading directions, 07 May 2008
Covering just over 200 great novels, you can argue til the cows come home about the editor's choices - who was left out, why this novel and not that, etc, etc, etc. List books about books are entirely subjective, but can take you in totally different directions in reading.
This book is split into 12 genres and has a world-wide breadth to it, and pleasingly for each book in translation (of which there are many), a suggested translator is given. For each novel a suggestion for further reading is given, plus the best film/TV adaptations where appropriate.
Some of the choices are not the obvious ones - for instance we don't have a Maigret book for George Simenon, but 'Dirty snow' about a teenage killer, although Maigret does merit his own sidebar.
Some of the genres used are the normal ones, but often with a twist - so we have 'Crime and punishment'; also 'Rites of passage', and 'Making it'; my favourite was 'A sense of place'.
The test I have of these catalogues is how many books I buy from it - I've already ordered half a dozen.
A great book to dip into and feed your bibliomania!

Horrible, 19 Nov 2008
The book might be cheap but it isn't worth the amount of money asked. I thought I would get an idea how to write a novel, just some insight and advise, and instead I get nothing. The author with great care, talks about ancient books, that are probably very important books, but are of no relevance really to anyone trying to write for fun and in our current century.
I don't need to know who or why someone wrote something in 100 years ago and while Jane Astin was an excellent writer, I don't want to know about her style or what it is called.
I had been looking for some qualified advise what to do in writing a story and what not to do, what techniques to apply and how certain sentence structurs could be used, I do not care to know how ancient English worked.
Therefore, while the book is most certainly well researched and if there is an interest in how or why some writers from a long time ago chose to write in a certain way, then I would recommend it but otherwise, it is a waste of money.
No valid points I can use for myself, just grief that I have wasted my money on it.
And I never leave any comments like this but this time, I felt I really had to.

Indispensable for the novelist, 14 Dec 2007
Terms are bandied around for different forms of novel writing, and you dismiss them as 'jargon', or perhaps 'gobbledegook', and move on. It's only when you've actually written a novel that doesn't fit the standard genre - historical, fantasy, adventure, thriller, etc - that you wish you'd paid more attention. If you've completed writing such a book without having recourse to the Art of Fiction, you'll need it at this point, otherwise you might be excused for thinking you've ploughed a completely new literary furrow. So, before you start preparing your witty acceptance speech on winning the Booker, do read David Lodge and you'll learn that someone famous has been there before you and that, in some cases, they have been lauded and slated by the critics in equal proportions.

You'll learn about Magic Realism, Stream of Consciousness, The Reader in the Text, Teenage Skaz etc etc. There's much in the Art of Fiction for the more orthodox writer, too. His essays are beautifully written, very clear and he uses well-known illustrative texts. I can thoroughly recommend this one for the discerning writer and reader.

Interesting and insightful, 09 Jul 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Interesting and insightful, 23 Jun 2007
"The Art of Fiction" is divided into 50 chapters, each devoted to a different aspect or theme in fiction (in this case primarily novel-writing). Some of these themes are standard topics: 'Beginning', 'Point of View', 'Introducing a Character', 'Chapters' and 'Ending' for example. Others are more unusual: including 'Suspense', 'Symbolism', 'Epiphany', 'The Telephone' as well as more technical-sounding topics such as 'Aporia' and 'Intertextuality'. Through these themes Lodge explores the construction of the novel and underlines the sheer variety of approaches taken by different writers over the course of time.

Each chapter is drawn from an article in Lodge's own newspaper column, which means that the subject matter is easily accessible and digestible for the casual reader. Lodge's style is easy to read and follow and he occasionally intersperses his analysis with his own anecdotes. This is 'a book to browse in, and dip into', as Lodge himself explains, which assumes very little prior knowledge of the texts concerned. Indeed his subjects are very diverse, ranging from Henry Fielding in the 18th century, and Victorian writers such as Brontë and Dickens, all the way to 20th-century authors including, among many others, George Orwell and Kazuo Ishiguro. However, it is not necessary to have read all - or even any - of these texts, as Lodge begins each chapter with a relevant passage quoted in full to illustrate his point.

The goal of "The Art of Fiction" is to enhance the reader's understanding of modern literature, and not explicitly to teach lessons in composition to aspiring authors. Nevertheless, for any writer it is always instructive to dissect those works which have gone before, and this book would therefore be of tremendous use.

Everything considered, "The Art of Fiction" is a worthy addition to the bookshelf of anyone with an interest in deconstructing how modern fiction works - either the casual reader or the student. Recommended.

Modest and magisterial, 25 Sep 2006
This must surely be one of the most astute crossover books ever: originally conceived as a series of newspaper articles, these fifty chapters make the sometimes forbidding and austere discipline of literary criticism accessible to the general reader.
David Lodge is no stranger to negotiating such crossovers: his comic novels have reached a wide readership while fitting perfectly into the tradition of the English comic novel, about which Lodge, for many years a professor of modern literature, knows more than most people. In "The Art of Fiction", he draws on a wider range of examples than in his other, more academically slanted, works of literary criticism. Each of the fifty chapters begins with an extract [occasionally more than one] from novels, or, occasionally, short stories. The majority of his choices are from twentieth-century British fiction [Kingsley Amis, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Evelyn Waugh...], but there are also incursions into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and into American and Irish literature. The extracts serve as introductions to aspects of fiction as varied as: symbolism, allegory, time-shift, motivation, irony, and the author is always at pains to link his extract to other literary works.
The overall result is both modest and magisterial. As David Lodge points out in his introduction, "this is a book for people who prefer to take their Lit.Crit. in small doses, a book to browse in, and dip into". His approach works brilliantly: this book is an invaluable source of inspiration. Most important of all, it doesn't matter if you haven't read the novels from which Lodge has chosen his illustrations; the whole point is that in many cases you almost certainly will want to read them soon.
A modern classic in a category all of its own.

Higher literacy, 29 Dec 2005
Imagine me - there I was, for decades of my life, thinking I knew how to read a book. I'd advanced through elementary school and prep, into college and finally to graduate school when I discovered, to my horror, that I in fact did not know how to read! Perhaps that helps to explain my affinity to literacy programmes, with whom I will begin working again come this Wednesday.

But no, perhaps I overstate the situation. What I actually mean to say is that it was not until my graduate school days that I happened across the most excellent work How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. This staple had somehow eluded me; familiar as I was with both Adler and Van Doren, I had never encountered this text.

This book was written in 1940, as World War II was beginning and the Great Depression ending; it was revised in the 60s and again in 70s, with the assistance of Charles Van Doren, another person who had had some difficult dealings with Columbia, due to his involvement in the quiz show scandals of the 1950