Book review: How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster

The forty-second book I read in 2017 was How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster.  It's always dangerous to review your own book in the subtitle ("lively and entertaining"), but Foster largely succeeds in writing a helpful and accessible book. 

Foster addresses common images and structures found in literature and explains what they usually mean and why the author employs them.  He covers quests, scenes in which characters eat, monsters, weather, acts of violence, Christ figures, flight, geography, seasons, characters with physical flaws, disabilities, and diseases, and many other symbols.  Along the way, he also discusses literary allusions, politics, irony, and secondary characters. 

A reader should complete this book ready to write a Freshman Comp paper.  (Seriously, no matter what book you're assigned to read, it's got to have at least one of the tropes mentioned in it.)  Foster even provides a sample assignment, reprinting Katherine Mansfield's short story "The Garden Party" as one of the chapters and then challenging the reader to explain the story's significance. 

Foster actually is the professor of the title (at University of Michigan-Flint) so sometimes his prose gets a little trying-too-hard forced-jocular; most of the time, however, he just comes across as friendly and enthusiastic about his subject matter.  My main complaint about the book is that I am familiar with so few of the books he uses as examples.  Part of this is simply non-overlapping areas of interest; his area of expertise is twentieth-century literature, whereas I rarely read anything written after World War II.  I think, however, that he might do better to use more "classic" literature as his examples, given that his audience appears to be high school and college students.