Aspects of the Novel. This book broke my brain. I don’t mean that it was difficult to understand; on the contrary, it’s an easy read, and unlike Forster’s fiction, it didn’t even make me want to kill myself. But it changed the way I read. I used to just, you know, read, but now Forster has me peeking around for the man behind the curtain, trying to figure out the tricks.

In this brief series of lectures, published around 1920, Forster suggests an approach to novel-reading that is not quite scholarly but certainly not uninformed. By focusing on the authorial decision-making process behind the various novels he examines, he puts the reader into the mindset of looking at novels as the product of a particular craft, and thus every reading experience (not just the examples outlined in the book) becomes an examination of craft.

What impresses me most, though, is that Forster manages to dissect the novel down to its bare parts without taking any of the joy or surprise out of reading. Which is more than I can say for any of the novels he wrote; those definitely take the joy out of reading.