How to Read and Analyse a Novel: Reading List

Your course list is here!

March is swiftly approaching (and with it, I hope, some warmer weather) and so it’s time to turn our attention to the first course I’ll be running this year: How to Read and Analyse a Novel. It’s not my snappiest title, but it is representative of what this course aims to do.

I have made this a section of the newsletter, so if you aren’t interested in joining us for this one, you can adjust your notification settings here. That way you can get emails only about the things you really care about.

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.

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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.

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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!

1. I have talked about this here and there before so apologies if you have heard it all before!

2. I found this to be particularly challenging with contemporary literature, too. I could not very accurately historicise my own period. I could talk about restrictive social mores in Victorian literature just fine, but what about some of the books that really spoke to me, the books from my own time.

3. I spent most of my first two years mostly not turning up which I now regret but as they didn’t count toward my grade my nineteen-year-old self literally couldn’t help it. Scottish courses are four years and you only have to pass the first two.

4. Obviously this is my first time using Substack for something like this, so do bear with me whilst we iron out logistical details!