63 pages • 2-hour read
How to Read Novels like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
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Background
Series Context: Foster’s How to Read Like a Professor Books
How to Read Novels Like a Professor is Foster’s second educational guide. His first, How to Read Literature Like a Professor, examines a range of common literary subjects—from food to vampires to religion—to show how they can be entry points for finding meaning in a text. In addition, Foster explains how literature uses its own grammar and how understanding it can help readers appreciate it critically. Foster’s third guide, How to Read Poetry Like a Professor (2018), aims to cut through the clutter that many find intimidating, examines various forms of poetry (such as the sonnet and free verse), and encourages readers to develop confidence in their own interpretation of poetry. In the fourth guide, How to Read Nonfiction Like a Professor (2020), Foster focuses on skills such as critical thinking.
Foster’s guides all aim to show that anyone can approach literature as a “professor”—that is, in an informed, critical manner. He demystifies complex literary terms and the idea that writers and advanced readers are a special cohort, helping enable readers to approach books from a place of exploration and joy. Foster’s literary style in the guides is erudite without being overbearing, and he uses humor and pop-culture references liberally to illustrate points. Structured like “how-to” self-help books, the guides received favorable reviews, and How to Read Literature Like a Professor was a New York Times bestseller. However, some books in the series have received criticism for a disproportionate focus on older, male, and white writers, as this Publisher’s Weekly review notes of How to Read Poetry Like a Professor: “[The book] does not reference many contemporary poets […] and female poets are underrepresented” (Review of How to Read Poetry Like a Professor, by Thomas C. Foster. Publishers Weekly, 2018).
Genre Context: The Nonfiction Educational Guide
How to Read Novels Like a Professor is a work in the increasingly popular genre of the nonfiction educational guide, which aims to make the complex concepts of a subject fun and accessible. The educational guide differs from a textbook in both its tone and goal: Guides or manuals are usually written in a more informal style than a textbook. The first-person author addresses readers directly, and the book includes anecdotes from the author’s life or professional experience. The guide’s purpose—unlike that of a textbook—is not to provide a complete overview of a topic but to pique readers’ interest in a subject and enable them to embark on their own creative exploration around it. While the genre is large and loosely defined, some popular noneducational guides are Reading Like a Writer (2006) by novelist and creative writing professor Francine Prose and A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even if You have Failed Algebra), published in 2014, by Barbara Oakley.
Another key feature of nonfiction educational guides is that they function as a “how-to” primer, promising to train readers to perform a certain function. For instance, How to Read Novels Like a Professor trains readers to spot elements like motifs and narrative voice and to analyze them for meaning. In addition, guides tend to use narrative elements of storytelling to make their content lively and memorable, such innovatively tilted chapters, vignettes of the author’s own experience, and key learning moments. These storytelling conventions draw readers close to the book, removing the formal wall around an academic subject. Thus, such guides strive to make difficult subjects less daunting and more approachable.
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