It was difficult to decide how many stars to give this book; three seemed a bit low, but four definitely seemed too high. The best part of this book is the suggested reading lists, complete with thumbnail descriptions: chronologically ordered lists of some of the most influential novels, autobiographies, histories, dramas, and poetry. I fully intend to use these lists to find future reading material.



Less useful, at least to me, was the "instruction" in how to read "serious literature"; I find the suggestion that one cannot perform "logic-stage" and "rhetoric-stage" reading at the same time as "grammar-stage" reading, that one must take physical notes in a journal, and/or mark and dog-ear the pages of the book, in order to have truly read and understood it, to be somewhat patronizing and excessive. Yes, if a book is proving heavy going, these techniques might prove useful, but they are hardly universally essential when reading anything that somebody might consider "literature". Still, I suppose that it was necessary for the author to have something of the sort included, or all she would have had would have been a collection of suggested reading lists, which probably couldn't have been published.



There was a lot of useful historical background here, as well, and the book was definitely worth the read. Still, I doubt that I'll be re-reading it any time soon, although I WILL be using the reading lists as reference material.