Well written, but not particularly helpful or insightful for someone who is already a reader. Some of the essays touched on interesting ideas, but they were too short to really develop them meaningfully. Rather shallow for its 200-300 pages, but not altogether terrible is the verdict here. ( )

Very slight. This reads like a mildly diverting essay one might find in the Sunday supplements puffed into book length to meet some publisher’s demand. And no, it isn’t, as the title avers, a book about how to read novel. Rather it is a book about how to choose a novel to read. Perhaps the reading bit comes later. Of course there are plenty of anecdotal and spurious tales to tell about the book trade. Sutherland is good at that. Also good at the cutting aside. Point scoring is such fun. But there is not much of real worth here.

Not recommended. ( )

This was just a long literary excursion. The advice was so general as to be unhelpful. I was looking for a book that suggested strategies on how to approach a novel that one has picked up and wants to read. ( )

I'm not sure that this book really does what it says on the tin, as it doesn't tell you how to read a novel at all! What it does do is to give the reader suggestions on how to get the most out of their novel reading. While the author John Sutherland was a Professor of English this is a book aimed more at the general reader than students of literature but most thoughtful readers would get something out of it. It's a wide ranging book dealing with a diverse range of topics, including: the mechanics of choosing your novel; what can be gleaned from reviews and prize lists; getting clues from the title, chapter headings and epigraph; and the physical aspects of the novel. One of those books which is full of interesting snippets of information such as this comment on margins:

But from the first printed books onward, generous white margins were left as they had been in the codex's manuscript predecessor. It would have been easy for compositors, then and now, to print flush against all four page edges. Instead, some 10 per cent of the page surface is left temptingly white. For what? Marginalia of course. Commentary. Nota benes. The four-sided, flush, verso-recto-balanced margin, standard in very novel, is a hangover from the age of manuscript, when they were there for the 'commentator' - a contributor who would add in marginalia, running heads, footnotes, corrections, embellishments. Now they are great white empty spaces - the result of cultural inertia.

I knew that 'marginalia' were things written in margins but it has honestly never occurred to me that that's what the margins were for, or now that we don't do that we didn't need margins.

One thing I should mention is that this book was published in 2006 and so predates the explosion in ereaders. Things have moved on so much in those eight years that even though the book looks at digital reading as well as physical books, it can't help but sound a little dated. But notwithstanding that, still an interesting read for all book lovers. ( )

The man is an inveterate reader and a good storyteller, and when he moseys along through his bookish world, I enjoy him very much. Sometimes not, though, such as when his Britishness shines forth as chauvinism rather than wit:

"It is no accident that the novel came into being after the Queen Anne copyright act of 1710, the first in the world." Much as I omitted to take down that sentence's page number, he omits to explain why he overlooks Don Quixote as the first novel, let alone Tale of the Genji. He is discussing the novel as a concept, not specifically early British or English forays, so he ought to have justified naming Robinson Crusoe as the first novel.

A few sentences on, though, he says something equally Anglocentric that I liked:

"Copyright did to storytelling what the 18th century enclosures did to the English countryside."

It's an apt metaphor unless you happen not to be as fluent in English history as you are in the English language.

I want to be confident that what I read in a nonfiction book is accurate. Besides overlooking Don Quijote, he also says, while discussing what a reader does not yet know, that Col. Mustard is killed in the library with the wrench. No, the reader discovers that Col. Mustard, who is alive and well, killed Mr. Boddy. Must I look up whether the year he cites for the copyright act is correct? What can I trust?

Then lots of errors: on instead of or, a skipped initial capital, and wide margins (which he likes, because he likes to take notes) that maybe should have been narrower to allow for more generous kerning. I do not like to read text likethis.

Plus he dropped a spoiler for The Wasp Factory, though he did give a warning before doing the same for The Human Stain. I assume he reasoned that because the former is British (though Scottish, not English), of course everyone has read it, while a little book by an American-thus-minor author is obscure. I suggest this, mostly facetiously, because it leads to another Anglocentrism: He says on p. 97 that it is "curious" to discover that The Great Gatsby is the most studied novel in U.S. high schools. Why is it curious?