In order to become a better writer I need to become a better reader, meaning I need to learn to read more fully on both a macro and micro level-macro meaning the overall structure and themes of a work and micro as how great authors use language. To this end, I’ll be reading Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer , Mortimer Alder’s How to Read a Book and begin with Thomas Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor . Here are some notes thus far:

-1- ‘Language of Reading’ A grammar of literature, a set of conventions and patterns, codes and rules, that we learn to employ in dealing with a piece of writing.

-2- [What Lit Profs think when reading] Where did that effect come from? Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? Didn’t Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard) say that? … Memory, Symbol, Pattern – the three chief things profs read for.

-2- [What Lit Profs think when reading] Where did that effect come from? Whom does this character resemble? Where have I seen this situation before? Didn’t Dante (or Chaucer, or Merle Haggard) say that? … Memory, Symbol, Pattern – the three chief things profs read for.

-3- Professors also read, and think, symbolically. Everything is a symbol of something, it seems, until proven otherwise.

-4- Pattern recognition – Most professional students of literature learn to take in the foreground detail while seeing the patterns that the detail reveals. [This is something I need to work on—I see it when someone points it out to me, but nearly never see it on my own.]

-5a- Chapter One: Every Trip is a Quest (Except When It’s Not) [Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and someone is really just going to the grocery store for bread and milk.]

Quests consist of: a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials en route and a real reason to go there.

-5b- The real reason for the quest NEVER involves the stated reason. Typically, the quester fails at the stated task. … They go because they mistakenly think the stated task is the real task, but their real mission is educational—it’s about themselves.

-5c- The real reason for a quest is always self-knowledge.

-5d- Greatest quest novel of the last century: Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49.

-6- “Always” and “never” are not words that have much meaning in literary study. [This is something that John Gardner says in The Art of Fiction about how no matter what ‘the rule’ is some author will come along to prove it wrong.]