Review | How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

It’s a rare day that I’m willing to give a full five out of five stars to a book. It’s rarer still that I’ll give the five stars, and then put it back on my bed-stand for continual reference in my future reading.

It’s just that kind of a book, and every bibliophile should read it.

In “How to Read Literature like a Professor,” Thomas Foster has given us a delightful little romp through literature, producing a guide to the themes, symbolism, ironies, allusions, and plots that recur through-out almost all the fiction we read. Whether it’s Charles Dickens or Charles Schulz or even Tom Clancy, Foster’s collection of essays are each a fun and enjoyable guide to what you’ve been reading, and what you will read, when you pick up a work of fiction.

For example: in chapter 10, “It’s more than just rain or snow,” we read that “weather is never just weather. It’s never just rain.” Rather, Foster says, instead of providing just a setting, a backdrop to the story, weather in fiction is rooted in our fears and hopes. In addition to appearing as a feature character in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic biblical tale of the great flood, it makes notable and significant sightings in mythologies from all over the world, often, if not always, appearing and appealing to our fear of drowning. “Rain,” Foster says, “prompts ancestral memories of the most profound sort. So water in great volume speaks to us at a very basic level of being.

So rain–and floods–signifies drowning? Kind of, but it doesn’t stop there. Citing D.H. Lawrence’s “The Virgin and the Gypsy” (1930), which I’ve not read yet, Foster sees it as a “big eraser that destroys but also allows a brand-new start.”

Kind of like baptism? Yeah. If you’re part of that Christian tradition, this is what baptism is: death of the old, imperfect, and flawed man, and rebirth of a new man. And such is the role that this element–rain and floods–plays in literature. Well, most of the time. Fog can represent a lack of clarity, sunshine hope and clarity. In short, weather is rarely just setting.

That’s rain and weather. Each chapter is a written with a quick and light wit that allows a reader, whatever his level of experience with literature, to follow along, see the theme, enjoy the examples, and find a taste for the point. Other chapter titles include the following:

• “When in Doubt, It’s from Shakespeare…”

• “…Or the Bible”

• “It’s All Political”

• “Marked for Greatness”

• “Nice to Eat with You: Acts of Communion” and, of course,

• “Nice to Eat You: Acts of Vampire.” (Stephanie Meyer ought to pick that one up to understand why people who love literature hate Twilight….or maybe she’s trying to be ironic? Yeah, I doubt it, too).

Weighing in at just under three hundred pages, “How to Read Literature Like a Professor” doesn’t need deep commitment, deep concentration, or deep literature reading. My brain-candy of choice usually falls in the science-fiction or fantasy categories, and yet, I’ve started to find the themes and allusions and ironies that I saw in classics like “Howard’s End” and “Bleak House” appearing there, too. Whatever you read, it applies the symbolism that Foster walks through. As a result, my experience, whatever I’m reading, has been more enjoyable since I started it. It’s that moment of sudden realization when the whole theme of Steven Erikson “Book of the Fallen” subplot (and there are a lot of them) is an allusion, or imitation, to Spartacus (I think). Or that the journey (all journeys are quests) across the water is a journey of transformation, where the fallen man chooses to start a new life, emerging from the water, as it were, reborn.

It’s fun. A lot of fun. Even just reading the book itself is fun. To boot, at the end Foster provides a list of all the books he refers to throughout his essays to allow you, the reader, to pick them up and read further. And what could be more fun about reading than delving into great fiction?

Pick it up, start reading, and enhance your general reading experience. If you’re going to read fiction, and you should, you might as well get the most out of it.