Stories written in prose and divided into chapters are fairly common objects in our lives from an early age, whether we encounter them in school, in our own homes, or simply represented in other media that we consume. If reading novels is more familiar to you than reading plays, you might think that you don’t need to do much to prepare yourself to read one for this class. On the contrary, reading a novel will require just as careful preparation as reading a play.

Reading novels can be challenging. Though you may have some favorite books that you have no trouble immersing yourself in, others are more difficult to read, understand, and write about. How will you work your way through the stylistic experimentation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye? How do you make sense of the interlocking stories of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried or Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio? Below, you will find some reading strategies that are particularly useful for reading a novel.

Get some context

One of the first things you can do, even before you start reading, is get a sense of the context of the novel you are about to read. When was the text published? What social or historical circumstances from that time period might be featured in the text? Who is the author? What do you know about the author’s life and how, why, or under what circumstances he or she wrote the text you are about to read? You might be able to get some of this information from your copy of the text. Books often include short teasers on the back cover, an “About the Author” section, or even an introduction to help readers understand the story they are about to read. You might also do some preliminary research online. The literary texts assigned in this course are all widely read and written about. A simple search for the author’s name or the title of the book will lead you to the basic information you need to get started, and your instructor can provide further guidance.

Preview the text

Before you start to read the text closely, flip through it to get a sense of what it looks like and how it’s organized. When you know what type of reading experience is ahead of you, you can adjust your expectations and reading strategies accordingly. For example, the short sections and relatively spare sentences of Slaughterhouse-Five will require you to keep track of the narrative in a different way than the longer, denser chapters of Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars. Knowing this ahead of time can help you to keep your bearings once you begin to read the text more closely.

Take some time to get a sense of what you’re getting into. Take a look at your copy—the table of contents, the blurb on the back, the introduction, the first few pages—and answer the following questions for yourself:

• How is the novel organized? Is it divided into sections? Are those sections divided into chapters? Are those chapters further subdivided? Do any of these divisions have titles?
• Who is narrating the story? Is the story told in first or third person? Is it told from one character’s point of view, or does it switch between multiple characters’ points of view?
• What is the setting of the story? Can you tell whether the story occurs in a limited time and place or across several years and locations?
• When you look at the language of the story itself, do the sentences seem straightforward to you, or does it seem that the author is experimenting in some way with language—for example, with how the characters speak or with how things are described?

In order to answer these questions, it will help to first review the “Analyzing Literature” chapter of this textbook. Your instructor will also help you to prepare to read the novel by discussing some of these questions with you beforehand. No matter how you answer the questions, though, consider: What do the author’s choices about organization (or narrator, or setting, or language) tell you about the story you are about to read? What do they tell you about how you are expected to read and experience the story? Knowing this will give you a firmer footing as you begin to read the novel in earnest.

Mark the text

It’s just as important to annotate a literary text as it is to annotate a piece of academic nonfiction. Both genres present their readers with new, often complex information. The nature of that information may be different—narrative in one case, expository in the other—but to keep track of it and understand it, you have to make your mark on the page. Underling, circling, or highlighting will allow you to note the details that strike you as significant and to identify patterns.

If you’re new to studying novels, it may be difficult at first to know what counts as “significant” or as a “pattern” other than the details that simply seem interesting to you. That’s okay. Interesting to you is a great place to start. It’s the beginning of a more developed interpretation or evaluation of the text. The chapters on “Analyzing Literature” and “Introduction to Literary Theories and Concepts” in this textbook will introduce you to other textual elements to pay attention to in order to understand and analyze the text you’re reading. You can also watch this video on “Reading Actively: How to Annotate a Text” to get further ideas.

React to the text

As well as marking significant details in the text, it’s important to pay attention to your reaction to the text and to note that reaction as you read. You can do this directly on the page by writing your questions or responses in the margins. Even a (!) or a (?) can help you return to an exciting or puzzling passage that deserves further consideration. In addition to marginal comments, you may also find it useful to keep a reading journal so that you can record your responses in greater detail. The questions that you write there may be the seed of a whole essay on the text you are reading, or the observations you record might be the springboard to a detailed analysis of a particular passage in the novel or play.

Reread the text

Once you complete your first reading of the text, be sure that you set aside time to return to the sections that puzzled or interested you so that you can consider them further, now with the context of the whole narrative in mind. This is why annotating and reacting to the text are so important. Not only do they help you to complete your first reading of a text, they also set up your second (or third, or fourth) reading by steering you back to the specific passages that require additional attention.

Research the text

In this class, much of the research you will do about the novel or play you read will be guided by your instructor, who will have additional readings and resources to share with the class. If there are particular topics that you’d like to learn more about, your instructor can be a great resource, as can the librarians at the Bass Library. All of these individuals can steer you to the best sources of information about the text you are studying.

Continue Reading: 22.6 Story Elements