Friday, August 29, 2008

How to Read by Thomas Foster

The title is a little to long to put in the subject

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines by Thomas C. Foster

I thought it would be interesting to get a Professors insight into reading. Being a computer science nerd, I never took literature classes and only took the standard English class that my degree required. Being a huge reader and fan of books, I'm sorry I missed that chance.

Foster is not ha-ha funny but he made this book highly entertaining to read. I read it with a notebook by my side because the amount of literature he throws out as examples was staggering (there's a helpful list in the back of the book). Foster uses classics and modern lit as examples and almost all of them triggered a "I want to read that" reaction.

Each chapter is broken into something to look for in your reading. He covered the range of Christ symbols, Greek, illnesses, heart problems, roads, shared meals, etc. And as he mentions at the end of the book, there's a lot he didn't cover. But what he did do was give you the start on recognizing that a horse isn't just a horse so you can delve deeper on your own.

I normally speed read books but this book encouraged me to slow down and think about what the writer is really trying to show me.

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