John Sutherland – How To Read A Novel, including Two Random Facts
I read these sorts of books for two reasons:
1) to feed the book-beast, by getting new recommendations
2) to feed the brain-beast, by acquiring random new facts
These are my own expectations and no-one makes me have them. So even though Professor Sutherland has let me down by failing to provide either beast with suitable fodder, that’s not really his fault. He wrote one book. I was expecting it to be another. I guess that’s fine.
However, when the book is called How to Read a Novel, you might expect there to be some stuff about how to read a novel. Not so. It’s really about issues to think about before you start to read, so that you get the most out of your reading experience. When there are so many books, how do you pick? Professor Sutherland is there to help you.
Which is fine, but I feel like if you took everything Sutherland says to heart, you would never read anything. You would be paralysed with fear of getting it wrong. Sutherland is about the context and the layers and the thinking of reading. I am about the expectations and the enthusiasm and the joy.
He undoubtedly knows a lot, and has read A LOT. He can tell you, for example, what the fifth best American book on the Civil War was (and also one to four) – but that can be a bit grating (there is a bit too much: “let me tell you about that time when I was chair of the Booker prize committee”). Even though this was only published in 2006, it already feels a bit dated – e-readers have gone from being the Next Big Thing to an Actual Big Thing, for example.
Here are the two random new facts I did get out of this book, though I’m pretty sure they weren’t worth 250 pages.
The name ‘Bovril’ is based on a group of characters, the Vril, in an 1870′s book by Bulwer-Lytton (of ‘it was a dark and stormy night’ infamy.) I have verified this on Wikipedia.
All the lovely Regency costumes you see in adaptations of Pride and Prejudice are anachronistic, since the book is set in the 1790′s, years before the Regency started. I knew the dates, though I had never put two and two together, dress wise. But now I think about it, it’s as if people were wearing leg warmers and ra-ra skirts in films about the early 70′s; or flapper outfits in films about Edwardian society, or skinny jeans from top shop in films about Thatcher’s Britain. (This is sort of a fun fashion game).
Finally, one piece of advice which I thought was worth taking to heart:
‘Know yourself (not, I hasten to add, know what you like, which leads to sadly impoverished reading habits).’ (p142)
Posted on April 20, 2011, in Uncategorized and tagged books, how to read a novel, Jane Austen, john sutherland, non-fiction, pride and prejudice, reading, regency. Bookmark the permalink. 5 Comments.
Hmmm…I’d have to pick some rather large holes in his claim that the book was set in the 1790s and that it is not Regency.
The formal Regency period began in 1811, but the cultural Regency period – the transition between Georgian and Victorian eras – began in the 1790s.
Austen began writing P&P in 1796, but made significant revisions in 1811-12. There are a handful of references – such as to how Lydia & Wickham lived ‘after the restoration of peace’ – to suggest that it took place before the ‘Treaty of Amiens’ in 1802.
But if Asten revised the book in 1811-12, then she was unlikely to see the first decade of the 1800s as a ‘restoration of peace’, given the on-off gain battles between Britain and France during the Napoleonic wars.
More than likely, she updated it to reflect the time around her and was predicting a final, but as yet unachieved peace between the two countries. And that would date Pride and Prejudice at the start of the formal Regency period and in the middle of the cultural period.
I’ll get back to my economic text books now.
Husband.
*phones marriage counsellor*
Whoa…I can’t get past the fact that your husband knows so much about the Regency period. Also, that he reads your blog.
Pah, you KNOW he just looked all that up on wikipedia (loser).
I find that I love books that are about books. However, I can find them incredibly difficult to read sometimes. I love learning new things about books or discovering new books that I want to read, but it can be incredibly difficult to keep up with it all. When it comes to reading choice, I am inclined to pick up whatever is nearby. And trust me, I have been acquiring books my entire life (21 years) so I always have plenty of books nearby. Not all of them are absolutely fabulous, but that is a chance I believe is worth taking.