How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

Foster explores works that are read in most high school and college survey classes. He gives simple explanations for complex concepts and does so with humor. Students who sometimes struggle with commonly used elements will surely find this a helpful addition to their reading and understanding literature.

This book is like a key that helps you unlock the mysteries contained in literary works. It's easy to read and full of insights and helps you dissect the many meanings in literature. My only criticism is that the book is too short. I hope Dr Foster is working on volume two.

This book was utterly amazing. It made me realize some things I have never thought of when reading some of the books he discussed. I found it both entertaining and informative and a great help in my quest to understand everything I read.

Anybody who's familiar with anykind of storytelling definitely should not need to read this. Watching movies, reading books, drawing parallelels and over-analyzing would be much more fun, and much more interesting. The author proves himself not a master of insight, but instead a master of tautology. The introductory chapter ought to have gotten me to stop, but hey, it was required reading. I could have died a happy reader without ever needing to read this book.

This is no On Writing. Its a professor who thinks too-little of his students' capacity to reason and too much of his own capacity to invent (and tell jokes.) It doesn't need to be so long (were this a good book, I wouldn't consider it long), but he's so preoccupied, not just with giving examples from literature virtually nobody needing the book would be familiar with, but with his own sense of humor and the brilliant interpretations he's crafted.

But they're useless. Really. If an author's done his job right, a literary work shouldn't be an intellectual riddle to unravel, but it should convey its meaning to the lay person through these devices. Somebody doesn't need to know "whenever people eart or drink together, it's communion, (Foster, 8)" to pick up on the emotional dynamic in a scene, and be moved subconciously by the close, familiar and personal setting. The same applies to every single one of his clumsy, bold, ugly little "rules."

The only thing worth taking out of this book, (though you really should know it from experience), is just to know that you should think about what you're reading. There's always a purpose, even when that purpose is showing you that there is no purpose.

And Mr. Linder is not the devil. He plays the role of the devil, he's the tool for the devil, but he is not the devil. He is by no means the villian, nor malicious, nor conciously buying the protagonist's soul. I'd even let slide his dramatic semantics if the story slavishly nad obviously followed a Faustian plot, but it doesn't. Walter Lee is not Faust, he lacks the will to power. He's merely trying to save his family. In fact, to trade the well-being of his family in exchange for the preservation of something material that he connects his identity to would be the soul-selling. I would not get along well in his class. What college does he teach at, again?

The above paragraph has no place in a book review. I apologize.

Foster gives a lively and very readable review of what we all learned in high school but have since forgotten. His examples are familiar and even include movies. Our book club read this and feel it will give us a little more depth in our discussions.