I had a good reading month in October. The highlight is 100% The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton. If you’re a keen reader, I highly recommend How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster. For Victober, I read The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy, What Maisie Knew by Henry James and a few short stories by various authors from The Golden Age of British Short Stories.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor
One book I devoured this month was How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C Foster. It has 27 educational and highly entertaining chapters. The purpose of the book is to solve a communication problem, like when in a classroom the professor says the story means this and the students say did you just make it up? How did you come to that conclusion?
I like how he explains things plainly and genuinely wants me to understand. He neither overestimates nor underestimates my intelligence. Some professors wittingly or unwittingly (hopefully the latter) make me feel stupid. They might be excellent in their academic field, but they’re rubbish communicators. Foster is an excellent communicator and teacher. Reading this book felt like having my eyes opened and I started to see things in stories for the first time. Those things have always been there, but Foster has now pointed them out and even better, explained where to look and what to look for when I venture out to the literature world on my own.
However there is a small price to pay. to use a probably not very appropriate analogy – after eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, meaning after reading this book, I can now see things in stories that I didn’t see before, or put it another way, I can’t un-see some of the things I was blissfully ignorant of. I’ll give an example when we get to the short story by D. H. Lawrence later.
The Napoleon of Notting Hill
I was worried that I wouldn’t get on with The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G. K. Chesterton because the narrative style was not the most accessible. I can now confirm, no the narrative style was not the most straightforward but it didn’t stop me from loving the story. People who know me a bit don’t greet me with how are you doing Nicole? They say, what have you been reading Nicole? And they can just drink their tea and nod. And this is the one I’ve been telling everyone about. I haven’t read such a playful, hilarious and original novel for a long time. I think Thomas C Foster would approve because, at the very end of How to Read Literature Like a Professor, his parting words are
Your reading should be fun. We only call them literary works. Really, though, it’s all a form of play. So play, Dear Reader, play. [Foster, Thomas C.. How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised (p. 305). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]
It’s likely there’s a social or political message for the readers of 1904 that I haven’t deciphered. But even just the surface level reading what the story is about is enough for me. I cannot make up my mind what to do for you – on one hand, it’s such an under appreciated little gem I want to tell you all about it, but on the other hand, it’ll be so much better if you know nothing about it and just have a go yourself.
I think I will do this as a compromise. I’ll leave you with a paragraph from his autobiography about how the idea of the novel first came to him. It does not spoil the story but when you read the novel, you’ll recognise things from this paragraph I’m going to read to you now.
I was one day wandering about the streets in that part of North Kensington, telling myself stories of feudal sallies and sieges, in the manner of Walter Scott, and vaguely trying to apply them to the wilderness of bricks and mortar around me. I felt that London was already too large and loose a thing to be a city in the sense of a citadel. It seemed to me even larger and looser than the British Empire. And something irrationally arrested and pleased my eye about the look of one small block of little lighted shops, and I amused myself with the supposition that these alone were to be preserved and defended, like a hamlet in a desert. I found it quite exciting to count them and perceive that they contained the essentials of a civilisation, a chemist’s shop, a bookshop, a provision merchant for food and public-house for drink. Lastly, to my great delight, there was also an old curiosity shop bristling with swords and halberds; manifestly intended to arm the guard that was to fight for the sacred street. I wondered vaguely what they would attack or whither they would advance. And looking up, I saw grey with distance but still seemingly immense in altitude, the tower of the Waterworks close to the street where I was born. It suddenly occurred to me that capturing the Waterworks might really mean the military stroke of flooding the valley; and with that torrent and cataract of visionary waters, the first fantastic notion of a tale called The Napoleon of Notting Hill rushed over my mind. [Autobiography by G. K. Chesterton]
Lady Jane Grey, Nine Day Queen of England
This is an excellent biography of Jane’s life by Faith Cook. Lady Jane Grey was a Tudor Queen you might have never heard of. In the will of Henry VIII, Jane was the fourth in line to the throne, after Edward, Mary and Elizabeth. By the will of Edward, she became the Queen of England after he died. And by the will of Mary, she was executed at the age of 17, because of her royal blood and the threat it post to Mary. It’s well-written, fast-paced and not dry at all. I highly recommend it if you know all about Henry VIII and his wives and would like to read something else about the Tudor history.
The Mayor of Casterbridge
This is the Victober group read. It’s about Michael Henchard’s tragic life story in a town called Casterbridge in Hardy’s favourite Wessex. I made a video specifically talking about Henchard’s relationship with his wife Susan, with his friend Farfrae which mirrors Saul and King David in the Old Testament in the Bible, and with his daughter Elizabeth-Jane. I won’t repeat myself here. It’s extremely sad. I’ll wait a year or so to read my next Hardy, I feel like his work is to be administered in small doses…
What Maisie Knew
It’s a very sad story about Maisie’s unfortunate childhood. Her divorced parents were well-off aristocrats but were extremely selfish who did not care one bit for their only daughter. There was a court case at the beginning trying to decide who Maisie should live with. But both parents wouldn’t give her up and she ended up living for six months with each. They did that, not because they loved her too much to let her go. Henry James explicitly explains:
What was clear to any spectator was that the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acids could be mixed. They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, to each other.
Even though her both parents were alive, by the end of the novel Maisie practically became an orphan, living on the charity of a stranger and for all we know, might end up living in the streets.
In terms of the writing style, Henry James’ sentences are very long and dense. I’ll read you a small example. This is the beginning of chapter one:
The child was provided for, but the new arrangement was inevitably confounding to a young intelligence intensely aware that something had happened which must matter a good deal and looking anxiously out for the effects of so great a cause. It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.
There are only two full stops in this paragraph. They’re beautiful sentences but a lot of the times they’re too dense for me to follow. I feel like Henry James has two modes of writing, one is for extra intelligent people who have a perfect command of English grammar; and the other is for ordinary people. I missed a lot of happenings and subtleties in long paragraphs and long sentences of the first kind but I enjoyed the dialogues and passages of the second kind.
Short Stories
Some of these are from The Golden Age of British Short Stories and a few from an Oscar Wilde short story collection. I’ll tell you very briefly what each story is about and one thing that stands out to me.
I read a few by Oscar Wilde because I was very intrigued by the contrast between The Picture of Dorian Grey which is a novel and The Importance of Being Earnest which is a play, so I wanted to try a different format again, short story.
The Sphinx without a Secret (1887) is a conversation between two men discussing the mysterious lover of one of them and concluding that she was a Sphinx without a secret. The narrator was shown a small portrait of the woman and his friend asked ‘What do you think of that face? Is it truthful?’ I find that a remarkable question – how do you decide what kind of face is truthful?
The Nightingale and the Rose, The Happy Prince, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend (1888) are from The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of children’s stories. I’m quite surprised by the Christian elements in them – there’s a repeated theme of garden and paradise. I don’t know why I’m surprised by it but I just keep getting surprised by Oscar Wilde! These short stories certainly feel different again to the novel and the play.
The Argonauts of the Air (1895) by H. G. Wells. I misread the title at the beginning and thought it said the Astronauts of the Air. But then thought that can’t be right! So I searched argonauts – The Argonauts meaning ‘Argo sailors’ were a band of heroes in Greek mythology, who in the years before the Trojan War accompanied Jason in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. Their name comes from their ship, Argo. In addition to the Bible and Shakespeare, I need to add Greek mythology to my reading curriculum. They are referenced everywhere. The Argonauts of the Air is two men’s effort to build and fly a flying machine. I don’t know if this was H. G. Wells’ sci-fi attempt or was actually based in reality. Because the first successful flying of a motor-operated airplane happened only eight years after this story was written.
The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit (1904) G. K. Chesterton is from The Club of Queer Trades, a collection of stories. Each story is centred on a person who is making his living by some novel and extraordinary means. To be honest, The Awful Reason of the Vicar’s Visit is the only short story from this month that I don’t want to spoil for you. Chesterton has certainly outshone everyone this month with both this short story and the novel I mentioned earlier.
Gabriel-Ernest (1909) by Saki starts with ‘There is a wild beast in your woods.’ And there is indeed a wild beast in the woods near the narrator’s house. I feel you can dig quite deep into this story – what’s the meaning of the beast’s name and the title of the story Gabriel-Ernest? What’s the significance that the narrator’s friend, who first discovers the beast, is an artist?
I decided to read The Prussian Officer (1914) by D. H. Lawrence after I reached the two chapters on sex in How to Read Literature Like a Professor where D. H. Lawrence featured heavily. One point of the author is:
When they’re writing about other things, they really mean sex, and when they write about sex, they really mean something else. [Foster, Thomas C.. How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised (p. 152). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.]
I was naturally curious to see if his theory proves true and here’s a fresh short story by Lawrence, what am I waiting for! And it turns out Foster is completely correct about sex in disguise. This is what I meant when I said, once your eyes are opened, you can’t unsee certain things.
Happy reading!
A Day of Small Things 