Dear readers, When I was young, I would sometimes get so excited about a TV show or video game that I would sit just inches from the screen. “Scoot back or you’ll hurt your eyes,” my mom used to warn. It’s good advice for books, too. When you’re a constant reader, moving happily from classic to classic to hot new release, it can start to feel as if your nose is pressed so close to the screen that you lose any sense of the big picture: How do these things work, individually or together? What do they mean? How do they fit into the vast tapestry of literature? Sometimes my mother’s voice comes to me and I think, “I need to step back so I can see better.” One way to do that is by reading a genre I think of as “the literary lecture.” These might be craft books or anthologies of criticism; they might be collections of actual, literal lectures. But they all offer a way to back up and view literature, literary history, and the art of reading and writing more holistically. For me, these books are the equivalent of a healthy scooting back. Here are two favorites. —MJ “Aspects of the Novel,” by E.M. ForsterNonfiction, 1927
Most readers know Forster as a master novelist who wrote enduring British classics, including “Howards End” and “Maurice.” He was also, however, an essayist and scholar, and in 1927 he delivered a series of lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, that identified and examined what he saw as the essential components of the novel as a form. Gathered here, those lectures show him to be a stylish, opinionated and authoritative guide. What makes a good plot? “Mystery is essential to a plot, and cannot be appreciated without intelligence. … To appreciate a mystery, part of the mind must be left behind, brooding, while the other part goes marching on.” What makes a compelling, believable character? One answer: “A novel is a work of art, with its own laws, which are not those of daily life. … A character in a novel is real when it lives in accordance with such laws. …. They are real not because they are like ourselves (though they may be like us) but because they are convincing.” Those are just a few insights from a book packed with them. A lot of what Forster outlines are elements we intuitively sense when we read but perhaps don’t have the language to express. And that’s the power of the book. Reading it is like turning on a light in a dark room — maybe we could feel our way around before, but thanks to Forster’s illumination we can now better appreciate what’s around us. Read if you like: Popping open the hood of a car, “How Fiction Works,” by James Wood (which is in fact where I discovered “Aspects of the Novel”). “On Morrison,” by Namwali SerpellNonfiction, 2026
Serpell’s essay collection grew out of her Harvard course on Morrison. Each essay tackles one of Morrison’s books, locating a key theme and exploring what it means for Serpell, for Morrison, for the work at hand and for the reader. If you are a nerd who loves the phrase “let’s unpack this,” then this book is for you. Reading “On Morrison” is like watching an Olympic wrestling match between two people at the top of their game — through witnessing their engagement, the audience gains new appreciation for both. When Serpell’s collection came out earlier this year, she toured the country talking with literary luminaries about both her book and Morrison’s magnificently dense novels. Then, in May, she began releasing those discussions as a podcast called “Passages: On Morrison,” which I avidly recommend to accompany her book. A recent episode with the New Yorker critic Vinson Cunningham captures why I love this show. While unpacking a passage from the end of “Beloved,” Serpell confesses: “This line, it’s always puzzled me” and then she offers her theory of the sentence to Cunningham. It’s a charming and disarming moment. How often do we get to hear people explain what they don’t know, what they don’t fully understand? To watch someone present this confusion to someone else and talk through it in an attempt to understand? Here, then, is a scholar not lecturing, not schooling, not directing, but talking, riffing, workshopping. Come for the scholarship but stay for the excellent model of a rigorous but deeply human reading practice. Like the book, the podcast is a wonderful dive into Morrison’s work, one that helped me better understand what the iconic author was up to — but it is also an incredible showcase of what it means not just to read a text but to step back and share it. Read if you like: Solving puzzles with friends; “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain,” by George Saunders; Toni Morrison, obviously. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. Friendly reminder: Check your local library for books! Many libraries allow you to reserve copies online. Like this email? Sign-up here or forward it to your friends. Have a suggestion or two on how we can improve it? Let us know at books@nytimes.com. Plunge further into books at The New York Times or our reading recommendations.
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