Review: The Book, How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines…

You learn something new every day—often more than one thing. Sometimes that learning expands what we know; at other times, it strengthens the skills we already possess. Reading, much like exercise, improves through regular practice. Yet repetition alone is not always enough: thoughtful instruction and guidance can help us read with greater confidence, attention, and insight.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Revised: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines, by Thomas C. Foster, offers that guidance while emphasizing the value of steady practice. It introduces fresh ways of approaching reading—not only as a skill, but also as a rewarding pastime that can enrich everyday life.

Foster introduces three essential tools—memory, symbol, and pattern—that help readers connect a work with the stories, myths, and poems they already know. Memory reminds us that reading is never an isolated experience: each new book joins a “Rolodex” of books we have read before. Symbols invite us to look more closely at objects, actions, and events, which almost always carry a deeper meaning beyond their literal function. Recognizing patterns, meanwhile, helps us see how, in Foster’s account, all stories draw on existing structures, motifs, and literary conventions. 

Foster offers an inviting guide to recurring literary patterns: quests, communion, monsters, weather, intertextuality, Christ figures, baptism, and irony. A quest involves a traveler, destination, stated purpose, and trials, but its deeper purpose is always self-knowledge. Shared meals illuminate relationships, while weather carries meaning beyond the forecast: a failed meal may signal hostility; rain can cleanse, destroy, isolate, or introduce irony; and fog often suggests confusion or moral uncertainty. Vampires, ghosts, and monsters can represent exploitation, selfishness, and unequal power. Intertextuality invites us to notice how writers draw on the Bible, classical mythology, Shakespeare, and fairy tales. Sacrifice, forgiveness, redemption, and emergence from water may evoke Christ figures or rebirth. Yet irony can overturn these familiar patterns, subverting a heroic quest or romantic knight to make a modern point. Together, these ideas encourage the attentive reading of literary subtext. 

Critics and general readers appreciate how Foster, an English professor at the University of Michigan-Flint, makes literary analysis approachable, replacing intimidating academic jargon with a witty, conversational, and engaging tone. Readers often credit the book with clarifying concepts such as quests, weather symbolism, communion meals, and intertextuality, while enriching their experience of books, television, and film. Some reviewers find its approach occasionally prescriptive or worry that it encourages overinterpretation, though the overall response remains overwhelmingly positive. Originally written for general readers, the book has also found a wide readership in high school English classrooms, Advanced Placement (AP) literature curricula, and introductory college courses. Educators value its open-ended framework as a companion to instruction, inviting students to apply its concepts creatively to classic and contemporary texts. 

Foster pairs his guidance on symbols, patterns, and recurring narrative devices with literary examples that invite readers to put these skills into practice. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby offers opportunities to examine quests, class, and symbolism. The third edition also includes Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Madeline Miller’s Circe: the former invites exploration of apocalyptic motifs and intertextuality, while the latter provides a starting point for considering mythic retellings and archetypes. Together with other examples, these works make literary analysis feel both approachable and rewarding. 

Foster’s book is available in second and third editions, and I look forward to reading the latest when the opportunity arises. I would encourage you to explore it as well. Fresh tools, approaches, and strategies can enrich the development of any skill—and reading, with its many opportunities for discovery, is no exception.