How to be Well Read
  • Published: 8 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9781409039150
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560

How to be Well Read

Formats & editions
Paperback
15 Nov 2022
EBook
8 May 2014
Buy from…
Amazon Apple Books Google Play Kobo Booktopia eBooks.com

John Sutherland's very personal guide to the best novels ever written, and why they matter.

Ranging all the way from Aaron's Rod to Zuleika Dobson, via The Devil Rides Out and Middlemarch, literary connoisseur and sleuth John Sutherland offers his very personal guide to the most rewarding, most remarkable and, on occasion, most shamelessly enjoyable works of fiction ever written.

He brilliantly captures the flavour of each work and assesses its relative merits and demerits. He shows how it fits into a broader context and he offers endless snippets of intriguing information: did you know, for example, that the Nazis banned Bambi or that William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying on an upturned wheelbarrow; that Voltaire completed Candide in three days, or that Anna Sewell was paid £20 for Black Beauty? It is also effectively a history of the novel in 500 or so wittily informative, bite-sized pieces.

Encyclopaedic and entertaining by turns, this is a wonderful dip-in book, whose opinions will inform and on occasion, no doubt, infuriate.
__________________________________________________
'Generous, enjoyable and well informed.' Observer
'Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned: this book will feed your addiction.' Mail on Sunday
  • Published: 8 May 2014
  • ISBN: 9781409039150
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 560
Categories:

About the author

John Sutherland

John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at University College London and previously taught at the California Institute of Technology. He writes regularly for the Guardian, The Times and the New York Times, and is the author of many books including Curiosities of Literature, Is Henry V a War Criminal? (with Cedric Watts), biographies of Walter Scott, Stephen Spender and the Victorian elephant Jumbo, and The Boy Who Loved Books, a memoir.

portrait photo of John Sutherland

Also by John Sutherland

Incomplete Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing
Incomplete Shakespeare: Hamlet
Incomplete Shakespeare: Macbeth
Incomplete Shakespeare: Romeo & Juliet
Curiosities of Literature
The History of Mr Polly
See all

Praise for How to be Well Read

A glorious selection of books to tempt you - all considered in witty and elegant prose. Highly recommended.

Sue Magee, The Bookbag

500 expertly potted plots and personal comments on a wide range of pop and proper prose fiction.

The Times

Generous, enjoyable and well informed.

Observer

Anyone hooked on fiction should be warned: this book will feed your addiction.

Mail on Sunday

A dazzling array of genres, periods, styles and tastes . . . chatty, insightful, unprejudiced (but not uncritical) and wise.

Times Literary Supplement

John Sutherland has been teaching English literature to university students for half a century. Now he's put the 'common reader' in the classroom in this capacious, witty guide to all the books you should read to claim the epithet 'well-read'. . . Each book gets a potted plot summary and a lively squirt of literary analysis, plus intriguing nuggets about the way reading tastes have changed through time, all told in Sutherland's breezy, intelligent voice.

The Times

Clever, offbeat and funny

John Crace, Guardian

Clever, offbeat and funny

John Crace, Guardian

Remarkably informative and quirky

Mark Lawson, Front Row

Remarkably informative and quirky

Mark Lawson, Front Row
penguin pop image
penguin pop image