Searching for novels / essay collections about literature

[Sparkling]

I just found The Art of Fiction by David Lodge and I loved it! Now I'd like to find more books like his and it would be great if anyone had any recommendations or stay-away-froms.

[Daedalus]

Aspects of the Novel by E.M. Forster is an old classic.

It depends whether you are looking at it from the writer's perspective or just to help you with A1 languages. For writers Gardner has a slew of useful books, like On Becoming a Novelist, The Art of Fiction: Notes on the Craft for Young Writers, etc. Also Stephen King has an interesting, if somewhat condescending, one called On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (second section recommended).

For reading there's some useful books like the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, etc. Accessible books like the one from Lodge are kind of hard to find, although your school should have some (my new school has like a dozen different types.. bit intimidating really).

On the whole though if you're really interesting in pursuing English at some higher level the best advice I guess is to read a lot, and not just books about books but also the books that everybody keeps mentioning (Catch-22, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, As I Lay Dying, All Quiet on the Western Front, 1984, Ulysses, and so on). For me reading comic/absurd novels helped a lot with understanding serious literature better, and the same thing goes for plays versus novels. The more you see of the whole picture the easier it is to understand why a writer might choose just one part.

Anyways in general if you're buying a book look it up on amazon and check out the reviews. Once I ordered a really terrible one and read the reviews after I'd read the first chapter and decided never to do that again. If only I'd spent a minute online beforehand I could have avoided wasting 15$.