How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines is a nonfiction book that aims to teach readers how to improve their reading skills. Foster, a longtime university professor, focuses on techniques that enable readers to puzzle out some of the deeper meanings of a story that exist below the surface level of the plot. Harper published the book in 2003, and the 2014 second edition, to which this guide refers, contains changes and updates to the text.

The book consists of short chapters that concern a wide range of elements found in fiction. The Preface contains acknowledgements and a description of what Foster learned from feedback to the first edition. After the Preface, Foster begins by explaining in the Introduction how literature employs its own “grammar.”

The first grammatical element concerns travel, as explained in Chapter 1, and the next two chapters involve acts of eating or consuming. Chapter 2 discusses how eating and drinking represents a kind of communion, or coming together while Chapter 3 is more figurative, explaining that vampire and other monster stories usually involve a person or a society that preys upon and consumes someone or something innocent.