How to Read a Novel by John Sutherland

I saw the title of this book and began to worry that my usual method (running my eyes along the words and letting pictures form in my head) was inadequate. Ever since my twenties, when I decided to leave the genre ghetto and occasionally read something other than science fiction, I have worried that there is something wrong with me because I spend a lot of time wishing the pace of the story would pick up a bit rather than marveling at the richness of the prose. Illogically enough, I hoped there might be some sort of lit. crit. magic bullet which would enable me to “get” the sort of books that win prizes rather than finding most of them tedious.

Much of “How to Read a Novel” is not about reading books at all, but about the various cunning ploys used by publishers to sell them. Much of the rest of it seems to be a collection of things John Sutherland wanted to get off his chest after his stint as a Booker Prize judge. When Mr Sutherland gets around to discussing the actual reading, his line is that no type of novel is intrinsically any better than any other type, and no one person's reading of a novel is more correct than anyone else's. This is admirably egalitarian, but it leaves me no further forward in my quest to better appreciate fiction. My sense of having been cheated by the book was enhanced by the fact the I had read huge swathes of it already – they had been published in the Guardian! According to my Academic Auntie, the book I should have read if I wanted to get more out of my novel reading is “Literary Theory” by Terry Eagleton.

Despite the fact that I cannot really recommend this book, there were some parts I enjoyed. Like the bit about wanting to write in the margin. More people should do this. Like Mr Sutherland, I see it as participation rather than vandalism and I enjoy reading marginalia left in a book by someone else. I once borrowed a book from my sister that had “C- See me.” written in red pen on the final page. This perfectly summed up the book in question which had been OK, but nothing like the author's best work. So all I have really learned is to keep a pencil handy when reading in order to add my own contributions.