-26- One of the biggest keys to reading like a prof is pattern recognition and that is mostly down to practice: if you read enough and give what you read enough thought, you begin to see patterns, archetypes, recurrences. … it’s a matter of learning to look and knowing where and how to look.

-27- Fiction writers don’t just borrow from other fiction—they borrow from history, as well.

-28- Dialogue between old texts and new is always going on at one level or another. Critics speak of this dialogue as intertextuality; the ongoing interaction between poems or stories. … Newer works are having a dialogue with older ones, and they often indicate the presence of this conversation by invoking the older texts with anything from oblique references to extensive quotations.

-29- What do we do if we don’t see all these correspondences?

Don’t worry: If a story is no good, being based on Hamlet won’t save it. The characters have to work as characters, as themselves. If the story is good but you don’t catch allusions and references and parallels, then you’ve done nothing worse than read a good story with memorable characters.