The Art of Reading

Artful Reading and Everyday Reading

Authors, Real and Implied

Narrators — Their Voices and Their Visions

Characters — Beyond Round and Flat

Descriptions — People, Places, and Things

Minimalists to Maximalists to Lyricists

Explosive Devices — Irony and Ambiguity

Reading for the Plot — Five Simple Words

Master Plots — The Stranger and the Journey

The Game Is Afoot — Sherlock Holmes

The Plot Thickens — Scott and Brontë

The Plot Vanishes — Faulkner and Woolf

Chapters, Patterns, and Rhythms

Scene and Summary, Showing and Telling

Subtexts, Motives, and Secrets

Dialogue — The Good, the Bad, the Ugly

Metafiction — Fiction About Fiction

Adaptation — From Fiction to Film

Realism Times Four

Thumbs Up? — Interpretation and Evaluation

A Long Short Story — "Runaway"

A Classic Novel — The Age of Innocence

A Baggy Monster — War and Peace

Picking Up the Tools