What has been passed down to you from the generations that came before? What do you want to retain, and what will you change, either for yourself or the generations after you? What might exist in you that you are not even aware of? Ursula Le Guin’s Gifts, the first novel in the Annals of the Western Shore trilogy, takes inheritance as its major theme.

Annals of the Western Shore was marketed as young adult fiction when it was first released back in the early 2000s. Whilst it could easily be read and understood by a younger reader, it features all of Le Guin’s usual sophistication and nuance as she explores a tangled and difficult theme, whilst still remaining eminently readable and enjoyable.

We follow Orrec, a young man from the Uplands. This place is bare and hard, and its inhabitants teeter on the edge of poverty. The lineage of each domain is defined by a “gift”, a power of some sort—denounced as witchcraft by the lowlanders—that allows each local leader to maintain their borders and protect their people. These powers range from the power to deafen and blind, to bend out of shape, to rein another to one’s will. And there is Orrec’s, the power of the undoing. Handed down from father to son, Orrec must decide what this inheritance means to him, and what he will do with his gift. Are there other avenues open to him, and what might they be? What does one do with the weight of such a responsibility? These are some of the questions we’ll be looking at today, as we dig deeper into this deceptively simple novel.

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This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at the nonhuman in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. If you’d like to join but feel like you’re too late, please do—you can take this completely at your own speed, and I will continue to keep up with comments and thoughts on all the books we discuss. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

An enormous flying bear, an apocalyptic city destroyed by a mysterious ‘Company’, holding ponds filled with the sludge of cast-off biotech, terrifying modified children, a cephalopod-type creature that just keeps absorbing his surroundings. What does Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne not contain?

We follow Rachel, a young woman just trying to survive in this destroyed city, this destroyed world. She spends her days scavenging for food, as well as useful biotech for her partner Wick, a strange and reclusive man who once worked for the aforementioned Company. One day, in the fur of Mord (the enormous flying bear), she finds a pulsing pod-like creature. She takes it home, drawn to it for some inarticulable reason. When it turns out this creature can learn, can move, can speak, she nurtures it until it is fully grown. That’s when its true purpose comes to light, a purpose that is far more sinister than she could’ve anticipated. But by that time, it’s too late, she already loves him—this ‘Borne’ as she has named him—and she watches on in horror as he tries to assimilate into this uncanny ecosystem.

This week, we’ll be looking at nonhumans and personhood, and nonhumans and morality. What is it about Borne that might make him a person, despite his alien appearance? Is he subject to the same kinds of moralities as us? How, and why? Let’s get into it!

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This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at the house/the home in Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. If you’d like to join but feel like you’re too late, please do—you can take this completely at your own speed, and I will continue to keep up with comments and thoughts on all the books we discuss.

Annie Proulx is the great chronicler of North American life, specifically the rural kind that is lived on a knife-edge, that exists on the cusp of change. Communities that rely on one industry—that have built whole ways of being on particular trades—are suddenly made vulnerable to the whims of nature, of climate change, of market forces far beyond their control. Such is the case with The Shipping News, Proulx’s sophomore novel that turned her into a literary star when it won the National Book Award in 1993 and the Pulitzer the following year. (It would also be an apt description of another book of hers I’ve read, That Old Ace in the Hole, too.)

The story goes that Proulx fell in love with Newfoundland first—an unusual place to fall for, for all its stark beauty—and decided to set a story there. Cue protagonist Quoyle, a bumbling doormat of a man, who after thirty-odd years in the States and one disastrous marriage that ends (literally) in a ball of flame, he decides to take himself and his two daughters to his ancestral home of Newfoundland. Thus begins an unusual, backwards kind of homecoming. Today we’re going to look more closely at the way Proulx dramatises this process for the reader.

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This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at the city in China Miéville’s The City & the City. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. If you’d like to join but feel like you’re too late, please do—you can take this completely at your own speed, and I will continue to keep up with comments and thoughts on all the books we discuss. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

The City & the City is not your average police procedural. Sure, we have some of the usual characteristics: a murder, an emotionally unavailable detective, a bunch of red herrings. And, of course, a dark and dingy city. Only in this novel, we have two of them, and they sit on, in, and around each other. Two nation-state cities with different languages, different cultures, different architectural styles, and different legal systems. How does it work? Well, the citizens of each city are taught to “unsee” the other, allowing the two to co-exist, though not always comfortably.

It’s a mad premise, but of course veteran ‘Weird’ author China Miéville handles it with ease. If anything the dynamics felt even more convincing to me on a second read, and I also better appreciated the way Miéville handled reader expectation with regard to the crime genre and its tropes.

Miéville will always be one of the best city writers to me; very few manage to capture the life of a city as well as he. If I could’ve assigned 600-page tome Perdido Street Station, I would’ve. The City & the City stands out in his oeuvre for not employing some of the richer, more baroque writing of some of his other work—he naturally emulates the sparer prose style of the detective fiction he is riffing off—but what it lacks for in vivid imagery and description, it makes up for in a premise that captures the very idea of ‘a city’ in illuminating and surprising ways. Today, we’ll be looking more closely at the way Miéville draws out this idea.

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This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at violence in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. If you’d like to join but feel like you’re too late, please do—you can take this completely at your own speed, and I will continue to keep up with comments and thoughts on all the books we discuss. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother is one of those books that explores themes many can resonate with—how does one reckon with one’s inheritance, with all the flaws and problems of one’s parents? and how do you carve out a life for yourself from this place, or approach parenthood yourself?—but that also feels highly specific to the place and people which it describes. This is the beauty of a good novel.

We follow Xuela, a woman from Dominica who is growing up in what she sees to be a loveless world. Social relations on her island are distorted by its long history of colonialism, first by the French and then the British. Xuela is of African, Carib and Scottish descent, and must forge a path for herself that doesn’t just reenact the dynamic of control, and that resists oppression of all kinds, from the more overt to the more insidious.

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This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at the body in The Doloriad by Missouri Williams. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. If you’d like to join but feel like you’re too late, please do—you can take this completely at your own speed, and I will continue to keep up with comments and thoughts on all the books we discuss. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

Surely the extinction of humanity will not be experienced as a single event, but as a slow decline marked by the occasional cataclysmic episode. Resourceful as we are, we’re likely to cling to life for as long as possible, regardless of what it looks like. If we’re lucky, perhaps we’ll transform into something new—at least that’s what Missouri Williams posits in her debut novel, The Doloriad. And that’s not as walking-talking cyborgs, or brains in jars communing with our personal AIs; we’re talking something much more earthy, much more embodied.

On the outskirts of Prague in some post-apocalyptic future, an encampment of humans remains. Here, the Matriarch presides over her incestuous brood, as she hopes to repopulate the world in her image. But her power is beginning to wane, and her children are starting to become more and more unrecognisable to her and the old ways.

When I first read Missouri Williams’ The Doloriad I thought it was one of the most remarkable debut novels I’d read in a while. I’m happy to report on my re-read that I agree with my original assessment. This is a fully realised novel with complex themes and a prose style to match. What makes it so remarkable is Williams’ clear vision. Whilst the viscous, dense prose may obscure this for the first-time reader, it is obvious from a close reading that Williams had a complete understanding of her characters, plot, aims, and themes. This is rare for a debut novelist, particularly one who’s not writing autofiction but genuine, bona fide imaginative fiction. There’s a real confidence to this work that I admire. And well done to 4^th Estate for winning the auction for her ‘satirical campus novel’, The Vivisectors. 2026 can’t come soon enough on that front.

That’s not to say this novel is going to garner a lot of fans. It is deeply strange and unsettling, and contains a lot of difficult, violent material.

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This post is part of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! With each book, we are taking a particular topic or theme and exploring its role in the novel; this allows for a reading which is both focussed and comprehensive, helping you hone your analytical skills. Today we are looking at Percival Everett’s novel Telephone and how language and communication functions in the novel. For full introductory details and the reading list, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

Percival Everett’s novels always surprise me in some way. Just when you’ve relaxed into one mode—satire, literary realism, historical literary realism—he pulls the rug out from underneath your feet, and you find yourself in a very different novel indeed. Telephone is no exception. This is Everett at his most elegiac though; he paints a heartrending portrait of an unravelling family—an unravelling man—due to a child’s degenerative disease. But just when you think you are in one type of story, the strangeness of Everett’s world seeps in.

We follow Zach Wells, a grouchy middle-aged “geologist-slash-paleobiologist”. He’s tenured at a university based on his work on one particular cave in the Grand Canyon, on which he is the world expert. He is pretty dissatisfied with his life, but his close relationship with his daughter provides it with a meaningful centre. Sadly, he and his wife discover that she has an incurable degenerative disease, and his world (naturally) begins to fall apart. Whilst in and out of hospital waiting rooms, he notices something unusual: in a recently purchased pre-owned jacket pocket, he finds a note saying “help me” in Spanish. As his daughter’s condition worsens, Zach feels himself inexorably drawn towards the mystery of the note, and the person or people who wrote it.

Notoriously, this novel was originally published in three versions with slight differences, hence the title: it’s like a game of Telephone. How truthful is our narrator? What is he trying to tell us? What is lost in the translation of author to reader? Why do we shift gears into what feels like another story altogether? What do we make of the marriage of these two plotlines?

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This post is the seventh instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! For full introductory details and the reading list, start here, there’s still time to catch up. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

It surprised me to discover that the first time I read Train Dreams was in 2022. I feel like it played an integral role in the evolution of my literary taste, and so I thought I’d read it at least a couple years before this.

Since then, I’ve read his debut novel Angels, which is a remarkable work. I almost gave up on it; it’s about a selection of downtrodden characters and for some time it felt like it was going nowhere. But then I pushed on towards the end, unable to give up on the prose—which felt electric somehow—and was left astonished by the ending. It’s the book I now associate with Johnson’s style, though of course with only these two to judge from, it’s clear I need to read more of his work.

Train Dreams has a much more pared back, subtle style that gently lets the life of Robert Grainier play out before our eyes. His life spans an era of enormous change for America, from the building of railroads that transformed the face of the country—connecting it and de-wilding it, at least in the conception of the time—on into the 1960s, when a new kind of consumer culture is on the rise.

Robert is a man who feels most comfortable by himself, especially after the tragic loss of his wife and child. He retreats from society and makes his home in a quiet valley. What can the tale of his life tell us about the relationship between nature and society, between nature and man?

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This post is the sixth instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! For full introductory details and the reading list, start here, there’s still time to catch up. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

In her recently published lecture-turned-essay Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, Isabella Hammad describes a scene in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, Returning to Haifa. In it, a Palestinian couple returns to visit their house in Haifa which they had fled during the 1948 Nakba. During their flight, they left behind a child, just a baby, and they discover upon their return that the Jewish couple that moved into their house adopted this child. When the son—now a man—finds out about his biological heritage, he denies it.

Hammad’s essay pivots on the idea of recognition. She explains that moments of recognition tend to drive her own writing, and in general have a long history within storytelling as a whole. In comedies, it might be the coming together of various narrative threads to produce some surprising revelation; the character is not a stranger at all, but a member of the family. In tragedies, it might be the cumulation of seemingly random symbols culminating in some grander discovery about the self or the world. These are high points in the plot, climaxes toward which the narrative works, and then from which things fall out.

She also emphasises that in narratives, and novels in particular, it is indeed “re”-cognising. That you will perhaps encounter something you already knew, even if you had not fully articulated it to yourself yet. These are, of course, in line with my own thoughts about how stories work, that we discussed earlier on.

As we did, she also posits that some of the pleasure of reading a novel is that realisation that we, the reader, are wrong about something. So there is recognition, but there is also surprise, epiphany, strangeness. The recognition of some new information might bring us not to a revelation, necessarily, but actually expose us to the limitation of knowledge itself. This is the power of a novel to astonish, to move you.1 It is also why it is particularly good at describing subjectivities, the ways each of our individual lenses puts limits on our knowledge.

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This post is the fifth instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel—we have now moved on to reading and discussing individual books! For full introductory details and the reading list, start here, there’s still time to catch up. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

The wonderful thing about taking on a project like this one is having an excuse to re-read books. And even better, to re-read them in that highly attuned way you do when you analyse a novel. Whilst I liked The Stronghold (also known as The Tartar Steppe) upon first read, this time I really loved it.

What has changed in the interim? I have a couple hundred more books under my belt, and a couple more years of reading closely, which certainly helps. The first time, the experience was made infinitely better by reading it with others through a buddy read we ran at the time through book club—in fact it is one of the most memorable buddy reads I’ve done!—and so I had the benefit of those conversations percolating in my mind already. I had a sense of what was already there, and I could look closer at how the book works, and why it works.

I won’t go too much into the benefits of re-reading now, lest we get entirely off topic. But in short, I’ve been guilty of feeling a re-read is pointless when there are so many books out there and I could be trying something entirely new. But every time I re-read a book, I find it an incredibly rewarding experience. I’m of the mind now that a book can’t be a true favourite until you’ve read it at least twice! And I’m perhaps now eyeing up some books I liked the first time around but wasn’t enamoured with… judging by my experience with this book, I’m wondering if I should make time for them, too!

For the purposes of this course, though, we can get the benefits of re-reading on the smaller scale. I have found myself in the last week or so reading and re-reading individual passages a lot more (not just twice, but four, five times) and it’s been really beneficial. You may do this naturally, but I don’t often really take my time with an individual passage or chapter these days unless I’m reading for a project like this one or for book club. But it’s amazing how something so simple can enhance your understanding so much!

Back to The Stronghold. This time it struck me as truly masterful. Although it is in theory a book in which nothing much happens, in truth a great deal happens here. We witness the entirety of a man’s adulthood, and that is no small thing.

Summary

First of all, thank you so much to everyone that did read this one with us, and also thank you to anyone who has contributed comments to the thread I opened last week! Please feel free to add more comments in the comments section below today, or continue using the chat thread, if you prefer. These will stay live, so even if you are seeing this in a few weeks or months time, I know that I, at least, would love to hear your thoughts.

For those that haven’t read this book or don’t intend to but would still like to read today’s post, here is a brief overview.

In the novel we follow Giovanni Drogo, a newly commissioned military officer who has been assigned to the mysterious Fort Bastiani for his first posting. The time period and exact location of the fort is deliberately fuzzy, and it has a surreal and mystifying feel from the start. This is characteristic of Buzzati’s work, as he eschewed realism for a more illusory and fantastic style. Drogo recognises almost immediately that there is something uncanny about this place; it is far from “the city” and cut off from society, and yet many of the soldiers there seem never to leave or even want to leave, whiling away many years of their lives. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that Drogo becomes one of these men, and we follow him as the time allotted to him seems to slip through his fingers in this strange, quiet place.

Much of the feel of the fort seems to be down to the fact of it looking out across a vast empty desert. The men there are supposedly guarding a border, but there appears to be no threat whatsoever coming from the north, and they spend day after day looking out into this desolate landscape. As time goes on, they fill it with their own fantasies and dreams, hoping that if they just wait a little longer, something might materialise down there.

Buzzati was an Italian writer living in the twentieth century. He worked as a journalist for most of his life, but also produced works of fiction like this one. This particular novel was written and published on the eve of World War II, which Italy joined in 1940 as one of the fascist Axis powers.

Translation

Before we get into considering how time functions in the novel, I wanted to talk about translation. I’ve now read both; the first time I read it I read Stuart Hood’s, and this time I read Lawrence Venuti’s which is new for the NYRB edition, published in 2023.

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This post is the fourth instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. For full introductory details, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

Today we’re thinking about the role of context and the role of the author’s biography when we come to analyse a book. We’ve covered a lot of technical aspects of the novel, but before we get to the books, I think it's important to think about these two things more fully in a post of their own—especially in light of the discussions we're having at the moment about whether you can separate the art from the artist. And I wanted to introduce you very briefly to a very influential body of theory which I think guides the way most contemporary literary analysts would approach a novel.1

When I was in school, my English lessons often seemed at least as much about teaching the history of the texts we studied as much as analysing the text itself. We had to learn about Elizabethan and Jacobean England in order to understand what Shakespeare was saying. We had to learn about the restrictive social norms of Victorian England to read Dickens or Eliot. Occasionally we would also learn biographical details, too.

For parts of my university career, the approach was similar, especially in the early stages of my undergrad and especially for older texts. But as I progressed through the years, the emphasis shifted. With the influence of post-structuralist theory from the 1960s and everything that came after it, now we were to attend to the slipperiness of language, to understand a book within the context of discourses, rather than historical or biographical facts. This was particularly true of contemporary literature, some of which seemed to speak to these bodies of theory directly (like the postmodernists, for example).

For a long time I ran with this. I always separated the narrator and author in my head the way you’re supposed to in academic essays, lest you sound like a naive teenager who confuses an author writing something for them endorsing it or having experienced it themselves. But as I’ve become more and more distanced from my immersion in post-structuralist theory, I find myself pondering the role of the author again.

Today I went back and re-read ‘The Death of the Author’ by Roland Barthes, a famous essay that has come to typify this movement in some ways in popular culture, though it is in fact just a very small part of a rather heterogeneous body of work attributed to post-structuralism. It is also commonly a little misunderstood

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This post is the third instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. For full introductory details, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

We’re now approaching the final stages of the preparatory element of this course before we get stuck into some actual books! Today I wanted to cover some of the technical aspects of a novel. Some of this may be self-evident to you already, but I think it’ll be helpful to go over the basics so we all have a common foundation to work from moving forward. I’m also hoping there will be a few things in here that maybe you hadn’t explicitly thought about before, too, which will help you in your analysis.

Thinking about this stuff is always useful, whatever mode of analysis you’re doing, but I wanted to highlight that it is particularly useful for the evaluative mode that isn’t necessarily part of an academic reading. As I talked about in this previous post, I assume you want to learn to analyse a novel not just to identify and elucidate its themes and ideas, but also to better understand what separates a good novel from a bad novel, or a good novel from a great novel, or what you like in a novel versus what you don’t like. Today we’ll do a whistle-stop tour through some of the aspects of a novel and some of the questions you could pose to the novel or to yourselves as you read, and what might differentiate between the more or less successful approaches to the form.1

As with anything else, I am still learning about this stuff myself!2 So please do add any further thoughts down below about anything you see here. I’m also hoping to explore the concept of the ‘novel form’ more in my Novel Thoughts series, which I will be resurrecting soon (I just started some of the reading for the next post today). But as a little tip, one thing I quite like to do at the moment is to read articles here on Substack by novelists discussing their craft and how they go about writing a book. As a reader, these can offer such fascinating insights into these more technical aspects, and are as useful to us as they are to other writers. I will leave a few as links throughout today’s post, and also list them in the Resources section below.

Our main question today is how does a novel work? How does a good novel create the effect it does? Why might some be more effective than others? I admit I’ve struggled at keeping my own opinion at bay here; some of the below does amount to me explaining what I think makes for a ‘good’ novel. Whilst there is some subjectivity at work with this, of course, I’ve drawn on my experience and tried to provide evidence, so I hope that there won’t be anything too controversial in my definitions. But if there are things you find you don’t agree with, I hope that simply by prompting you to think about some of these things, it might help you anyway

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This post is the second instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. For full introductory details, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

Great novels are full of the complexity of life, and it would stand to reason that analysing them should be an equally complex process. But in reality this needn’t be the case. I think there are a lot of smoke and mirrors around literary analysis—only great scholars can do it well, or you need to have a wealth of contextual information to even make a start. But really, it is a fairly simple set of tools. You need to know how to look, where to look, and then you need lots of practice.

Making an argument

I belatedly realised last week that the questions and themes I assigned to each of the books were pretty intense, especially if you are a beginner to all this. But there was logic, I promise!

When you analyse a book—whether you’re writing an essay about it or not—you are essentially always crafting an argument about it. This is what we touched on last week: analysing is getting in conversation with the book. And when you have finished your initial analysis, you should have some cohesive idea of what the book is saying and doing—this is your argument!

Say you love a book and encounter someone who hates it. You need evidence to back up why you like it, to argue your point! And this evidence needs to make rational sense altogether. While most readers might come to a decision about whether a book is good or bad, we want to go a bit further: how does this book fit into the world as we know it? Where does it falter, where does it excel?

This is why I’ve structured those questions in the way that I have. The brilliance of the singular question is that it’s prompting you to craft a very specific argument, to argue with it (and I do intend you to challenge some of those statements if that makes sense to you!) And by keeping focus on just one theme, we should be able to push into some of the lesser-used arenas of analysis.

I also worded them rather formally and abstractly. This is actually to give you more scope. You can interpret things multiple different ways.

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This post is the first instalment of a course I’m currently running for paid subscribers called How to Read and Analyse a Novel. For full introductory details, start here. You can adjust your notification settings here if you would like to opt out of these emails.

Surely we have all been in that English lesson where a student bemoans the fact of having to ‘read between the lines’ of any given novel? Despite my certified English nerd status, there was a time when even I couldn’t stomach looking for yet more religious symbols in Middlemarch.

I don’t want to get into the weeds too much, but there has been a lot of debate recently about how English should be taught in schools, including some complaints about having to analyse novels in the classroom—why can’t English teachers just let (or make) kids enjoy the books they’re reading? Why ruin it with all this talk of symbolism and allegory? Luckily for me, Sara from FictionMatters has already written a whole post about how this is patently absurd, and it is not an English teacher’s job to help you or your kid love reading.1

But of course, these posts did get me thinking, especially as I knew I’d be tackling my own course on analysing novels. We aren’t in an English classroom and hopefully you already want to delve deeper into your books, so I’ve got a much easier job already. But whilst I have always been that person for whom analysing novels brought satisfaction and a more profound sense of enjoyment, that clearly isn’t immediately true for everyone.2 I think some of the power of this process will make itself known in practice, but I wanted to pause and make a case for analysing novels, beyond the classroom experience.

As Sara rightly says, English lessons are about giving you the building blocks for writing, the tools for literacy—reading and understanding a text and its context—and teaching you a bunch of technical language for reading poetry, say, that you will probably forget (much like any other subject).

But for me the situation is reversed. I actually would quite like to impart some kind of enjoyment; to infuse this experience with the revelatory energy of exploring a novel in greater depth. Focussing on this, then, why might this be a good thing to do? And how will it not ruin your experience of reading and put you off for life?

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So how will it work? This course will run for approximately three months (March to May), and for the first month or so, it will be a selection of posts dedicated to the basics. Why it’s valuable to learn how to analyse a novel, the role of close reading, and looking at things like form, genre and theory. Then in the second part of the course, we’ll be looking at a selection of common themes through discussion of specific books.

I have, of course, thought a lot about all the different ways to approach this and share some of what I’ve learnt over the years. In many ways, some of these things have become intuitive, so there wasn’t a particularly obvious way to go about it.

My initial thought was to make it more theory-based, as I feel like my MA was so influential on how I interacted with what I read (the course was Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory and we read a lot of the latter). But then I realised that perhaps the MA changed the way I saw the world, not necessarily literature or novels specifically. Plus I am hardly an expert in this more complicated and cerebral field, though we can explore some theory together at a later date if you would like.

What I feel like I am approaching expert territory on, though, is how to actually interact with and interpret novels. Hence the course! So going back to the drawing board and with a renewed focus, it seemed to me that actually the theory was less important than the way I literally engaged with texts moment to moment whilst I was reading them. And I realised there was a very specific instance I could point to when things started slotting together for me.1

As I’m sure many of you will recognise from your own English lessons at school, although we read many novels in the classroom, the themes and discussion points of a book would be laid out for me by a teacher. Undoubtedly this is vital work that lays the foundations for being able to do it on your own. It is, literally, teaching. But when in the more accelerated world of university (one book per week rather than one book per term) and facing these novels mostly by myself, I found I couldn’t reach anywhere near that kind of depth. Poetry seemed much easier to tackle; at least the language there is often overtly symbolic, and the form is different poem to poem. One can make up all kinds of arguments about this or that aspect. But a five-hundred-page novel!? Where to begin?2

In my third year3 I had a selection of difficult essay questions to choose from for a course about American coming-of-age novels, and I ended up choosing the following: ‘The coming-of-age narrative is essentially a search for the authoritative language of the father.’ Substantiate, modify, or refute this argument. I remember thinking this was the best of a bad bunch, but having absolutely no idea how I would be able to formulate an essay around this. How am I supposed to look for “the authoritative language of the father” in a long novel? Where does it reside?

I cracked open my copy of Brady Udall’s The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint, and started to read it again from the top. And suddenly I could see it in the book. I could see all the relevant quotes, the relevant moments. I got my first ever first for this essay, and it marked a real shift in my abilities, approach and confidence.

I thought of other ways to approach this course. A more formal historical tour through English literature? Tutorials on close reading? But I couldn’t shake that revelatory feeling I had all those years ago, sitting in the library, and seeing a book I had already read in a totally new light.

Although I had to name the course what I did, obviously it would more accurately be titled ‘One Way of Reading and Analysing a Novel’ (even less snappy). I know this is very specific to me, and it won’t work for everyone, but if I can recreate that feeling for even a few of you, I would consider my job done. I realised that we are, after all, beholden to no curriculum here and no requirement to approach this topic a certain way. And hopefully you are here because you already like my approach in some ways, so why should I not be led by my sense of what will be truly effective rather than what I feel we should do? I hope that you’ll finish this course feeling like you’re better able to identify themes in both content and form, and get the evidence to back it up. And I hope that you’d get value from this at whatever stage you’re at, whether you are more or less familiar with analysing novels. Anyway, we’ll talk more about this in week one, where I’ll cover why this is such a valuable practice.

The Reading List

Let’s move on to the exciting part—the reading list! The plan is this: once we have made our way through the basics for the first four weeks, which will be delivered in written and lecture form (video or audio? not sure yet), we will be approaching a common aspect of a novel or theme + a novel that typifies this aspect/theme each week. So I’ll be producing mini-analytical essays and then we can also have discussions about these. I don’t know about you all but I don’t love the Substack chat feature, though I know others do make use of the threads there for discussion. We could feasibly also use comment sections, which may be a neater solution.4

The idea is that I will assign a question or small group of questions around the theme as it relates to each book for you to think about as you read. I’ll do this fairly early on in March so that you can get a head start on your reading before we get into the more analytical section, or alternatively you can read each book week-to-week once we get into it in April. This will be a targeted approach, in each case we will be looking for one major theme so that you can really get to grips with it. It’ll be like the best bit of the essay writing process without actually having to produce the essay—though writing out something can be helpful in synthesising thoughts. Hopefully the discussion can come in there.

The reason I did it this way is because I feel like the best way to learn to analyse a novel is to actually practise it with some degree of focus. And I find that there are common themes that occur across a lot of novels; spotting them in one may help you spot them in another.

I have also chosen a few books which you may have already read if you’ve been following me for a while. Partly because my favourite books reward this kind of work—that’s why I like them! But also to make life a bit easier for you. Of course I’d recommend re-reads with the relevant theme in mind in an ideal world, but equally if you’re short on time hopefully you’ll be able to get something out of the posts and discussions. I’ll also aim to design it to be entertaining (this is not school after all) even if you don’t want to read a particular book, or any book! Your participation is totally up to you. Finally, I tried not to pick enormous books, as much as I wanted to.

I obviously came up with way too many themes than we had weeks (I also didn’t want to assign a million books), so there may be a part II of this course in the future!

These posts will come out every Sunday, and will be available to paid subscribers only. The books assigned to the weeks commencing with the below dates will be discussed that Sunday (i.e. you could read them the week they are set for).

24th March: The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati (also known as The Stronghold)

31st March: Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad

7th April: Train Dreams by Denis Johnson

14th April: Telephone by Percival Everett

21st April: The Doloriad by Missouri Williams

28th April: The Autobiography of My Mother by Jamaica Kincaid

5th May: The City and the City by China Miéville

12th May: The Shipping News by Annie Proulx

19th May: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer

26th May: Gifts by Ursula Le Guin

If nothing else, you’ll read some truly great books.

I am now just itching to get started! The first official post with themes and questions will be coming on Sunday 2nd March. See you then!

Begin the course here: