Among the many reasons I like reading the Guardian Review are the extracts from books on reading and writing which are frequently serialized in its pages. The latest of such offerings* is John Sutherland's "How To Read A Novel".

In Part 1, Sutherland addresses the challenge any book buyer faces when he or she enters a book store: what book to buy in the current cornucopia of paper? His excellent advice:

"But I recommend ignoring the hucksters' shouts and applying instead the McLuhan test. Marshall McLuhan, the guru of The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), recommends that the browser turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book. It works. Rule One, then: browse powerfully and read page 69."

In Part 2 he speculates on how the idea of copyright, with its attendant symbol ©, has given rise to the novel, and how it has pushed literary creation away from the freewheeling story telling folkways. Also on the typography’s size of an author's name on the book, Sutherland snark-ingly writes:

"As a general rule, with authors' names only one question is worth asking: "Do I know it?" If the answer is yes, it will have the status of a brand. How strong that brand is expected to be for the general reading public will be reflected in whether it is in larger print on the cover, or dust jacket, than the title of the book. If the author is really "big", it is giants and pygmies.

All that the title has to do, in such cases, is reassure you, the reader, that you have not already read it. The name Stephen King sells the product as effectively as Coca-Cola."

Finally, in the latest installment, Part 3, after discoursing on the role of authorial photographs on books (a great observation: "It would be possible to write a history of the novel in terms of the poses that novelists have struck for the lens over the past century and a half, and the changing iconography of authorship those poses project"), Sutherland goes to offer an entertaining look at the first lines of a novel's text ("the moment of coupling" as he calls it) through the immortal first lines of Austen's "Pride & Prejudice" , Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", and Melville’s "Moby Dick"**. So go take a look.

... *One such series which I previously enjoyed reading was based on Jane Smiley's "13 Ways of Looking at the Novel". In the the two opening pieces Smiely explains how and why she put away her writing to go back to the task of reading, and details the (non)modus operandi behind how she selected the roughly 100 novels which she read, and then wrote about in this book. And these are the pieces in which Simely discusses various novels from her list of 100: [Part a, Part b, Part c, Part d, Part e, Part f, Part g, Part h, Part i, Part j, Part k, Part l, Part m, Part n, Part o]