Reading Style: A Life in Sentences

by Jenny Davidson

A professor, critic, and insatiable reader, Jenny Davidson investigates the passions that drive us to fall in love with certain sentences over others and the larger implications of our relationship with writing style. At once playful and serious, immersive and analytic, her book shows how style elicits particular kinds of moral judgments and subjective preferences that turn reading into a highly personal and political act.

Melding her experiences as reader and critic, Davidson opens new vistas onto works by Jane Austen, Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Pynchon; adds richer dimension to critiques of W. G. Sebald, Alan Hollinghurst, Thomas Bernhard, and Karl Ove Knausgaard; and allows for a sophisticated appreciation of popular fictions by Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Lionel Shriver, George Pelecanos, and Helen DeWitt. She privileges diction, syntax, point of view, and structure over plot and character, identifying the intimate mechanics that draw us in to literature's sensual frameworks and move us to feel, identify, and relate. Davidson concludes with a reading list of her favorite titles so others can share in her literary adventures and get to know better the imprint of her own reading style.

Genres: Nonfiction, Writing, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Language, Books About Books, Literature

208 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 2014

About the author

Jenny Davidson is a professor at Columbia University and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of the novel HEREDITY (2003); two YA novels, THE EXPLOSIONIST (2008) and INVISIBLE THINGS (2010); and several academic books.

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) Good fun: opinionated, erudite but accessible literary criticism from a Columbia professor. Her points of reference are so variable that almost everyone should find something to enjoy here: from Herman Melville to Jonathan Lethem, Gustave Flaubert to Stephen King, and Jane Austen to Lydia Davis. Davidson often makes surprising connections, like that between George Eliot and Lionel Shriver, whom she refers to as “good ‘bad’ writers.” I can see what she means there: they’re both rather unsubtle, their messages delivered in a sometimes overpowering narrative voice – the very definition of being hit over the head with meaning.

The author also dislikes “sensation-freighted-with-significance,” which means she takes issue with writers like Virginia Woolf, Alice McDermott, William Trevor and Alice Munro. I appreciate her observation that “beautifully written novels are infinitely less likely to be joyful than despairing.” I also like her warning that particular books need to be read at particular times of life – a main example being Eliot and Henry James, better read in one’s twenties or later than in one’s teens. “There is something to be said for waiting to read a given book until one is truly prepared to plunge into its depths.” Moby-Dick, for instance, ended up being a key non-required read for her in her college years.

Like Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer, this book’s close reading approach occasionally relies too heavily on long excerpts. (So now I know so much about it that I barely need to read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty.) However, at times this gives just the right level of literary education: she’s chosen such perfect passages to illustrate the sections on James, Marcel Proust and Georges Perec that I now feel like it’s okay if I never read anything more from them. (I’ve read What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw, but doubt I’ll ever manage a longer work from James; Proust has never particularly appealed.)

I would class this one with Julian Barnes’s Something to Declare, the first book I ever read by him: you needn’t know anything about the subject matter to find the writing a gentle delight.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book for anyone who cares about reading beyond the story-telling. It is written for those of us that think of the written words as an entire world, not just decoration. Many writers can string sentences together to tell a story, but not every writer has the gift to chose words that are playful on the tongue and frolic in the mind. Any voracious reader knows the difference between writing that nourishes the soul and books that are chewed up and spat out. Some may find such thinking snobbish, but they would be missing out on the pleasure that beautiful, moving literature gives to the reader. One could even say the writer has the ability to transcend story- telling in creating a playground with sentences, moving beyond the subject. The sentences can serve as a character, can inspire feelings beyond imagery. Sentences can be coy, provocative, inflammatory, heavy, spiritual... the list runs on. Writing can be more than See Spot Run. Jenny Davidson's book is insightful and pleasurable whether you care about the details or not. An intelligent read.

[Mandy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Jenny Davidson is an academic and book lover, and in this book explores what for her is the joy of the reading experience, the joy of the perfect sentence. It’s difficult to categorise the book, which is part memoir, part literary critique, part meditation on style, part a collection of essays on the writers she most admires. For Davidson it’s the more formal aspects of writing that she is most interested in and beguiled by – sentences, syntax, the structural elements rather than plot and character. She examines in depth authors such as Henry James and Alan Hollinghurst, writers she admires, whilst rather dismissing William Trevor and Alice Munro for whom character is key. This leads to some rather puzzling views, such as “At times, (George) Eliot’s style has about it something graceless or embarrassing”. Really? Yes, really, for Middlemarch, apparently is “full of sentences that make me cringe.” The chapter on Henry James I found pretty impenetrable, just as I do Henry James himself, and even Davidson admits it’s probably the hardest to read and “it will not represent a failure of spirit on the reader’s part to skip ahead to the next one.” So for whom exactly is she writing? Not me, I fear, for although I enjoy beautiful prose as much as the next person, I must admit to having a fondness for carefully crafted plot and well-rounded character. However, for the serious student of literature, this book, concentrating as it does on form rather than content, may well be of both use and interest. If you are concerned with how writers write, then Davidson’s expositions will no doubt strike a chord. But it is not, perhaps, a book for the general reader, and for a book focussed on form I found it strangely formless and meandering.

[Paula Schumm · Rating 1 out of 5]

I rarely abandon a book, but I had to run screaming from Reading Style: A Life in Sentences by Jenny Davidson. I love books. I even love books about books. I've even read many of the books that Ms. Davidson references in Reading Style. The author is a professor who is very knowledgeable and means well, but she comes across as thinking she knows more about writing and composition than the classic authors. Reading Style may some day be a valuable text for budding authors, but personally I think Jenny Davidson just likes to hear herself talk.
Thank you to NetGalley and Columbia University Press for a free advance copy of this book.

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a thrill. So many provocative observations on style, "mouthy" sentences (hence the chocolates on the cover), load-bearing tractional sentences (pleased me that she discussed the Gary Lutz sentences-piece from the Believer ("The Sentence Is a Lonely Place"), and surprising links/juxtapositions ("Lionel Shriver is a bad writer - but a bad writer in the sense that George Eliot, too, is a bad writer." [!?!])

I have published four novels, but I have become increasingly frustrated with the aspect of fiction that involves making up characters and the things that happen to them; it seems to me fatally artificial, an abuse of my own imaginative powers and an insult to what I see as the underlying purpose of any novel I would write (to examine or anatomize a problem or a situation, in the process transmitting something of a mood or an emotional affect -- really I am an intellectual at heart rather than a novelist, but I don't see that the two should finally be at odds with one another).

Davidson also cites Lydia Millet on the consequences of a certain sort of realistic and personal fiction ("domestic" fiction) exemplified by the literary short story (Munro, William Trevor, and Franzen in longer fiction). Millet:

The shortcoming of this fiction of "people with problems" [is that] these problems are rarely starvation or war; they tend to be adultery or career disappointment, say, which leaves us with a literary culture whose preoccupation is not meaning or beauty, not right or wrong, not our philosophies or propensity for atrocities or corrupt churches and governments, but rather our sex lives, our social mistakes, our neigbourhood failures and sibling rivalries. Enlightenment humanism finds a kind of perfect expression here: If our deliberations about our personal lives, consisting of a near-infinite scrutiny of the tiny passages through which we move in relation to friends and lovers, constitutes the best calling of art, must such self-scrutiny not also be our own highest calling and rightful task?

Then Davidson: [...]

the literary short story, in North America, suffers especially pervasively from the sort of self-absorption (to use the term literally rather than pejoratively, describing simply an involvement with individual self) ...[...] the tradition of John Updike and John Cheever and Alice Munro seems to me excessively centered on an aspect of life that would seem to be woefully narrow, at least in the greater context of political struggle and institutional service and global migration and passionate religious belief or intellectual commitment, to name just a few of the things that make lives interesting.

Then she quotes a passage from an Alice McDermott novel and says:

the problem I have with it - the thing that makes it leave me cold - is that it is so much concerned with sensation at the expense of thought or even emotion. I'm not enthusiastic about that aspect of Woolf's writing either - [...] I find myself not very interested even in my OWN sensations, and not at all interested in sensations and physical observations supposedly filtered through the consciousness of this character of McDermott's. I would rather know what the character THINKS, thinks about something interesting or funny or important or irrelevant.

Lest it seem that Davidson is hostile to contemporary fiction, this from a Columbia University Press blog interview:

My life would be almost unbearably impoverished if I didn’t read space opera, urban fantasy, neo-noir, horror (it would pain me to give up any one of these, and the thought of a life without any of them is genuinely intolerable).

She reads Stephen King, Lavie Tidhar, Harry Stephen Keeler . . . what an interesting reader she is.

[Missi Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it through 30% of Reading Style and finally got over the guilt. This was my first free NetGalley book and I really, really wanted to like it and include it in the opening of my new blog, www.no-vice-no-virtue.com. I decided to pass on reviewing it there because I was once taught that if I didn't have anything nice to say, I shouldn't say anything at all.

The language in Reading Style is verbose and tedious. I spend time with academic writing and I'm familiar with many of the titles Davidson examines, so I was not at all deterred when I first set out to read the book. But it wasn't long before opinions became tiresome and I wished that the author could create as engaging sentences as the ones she harshly critiqued. Deconstructionists may love this and I can see a few of my past professors nodding and mmmming their way through it, but I was lacked the attention span and interest that it must take to read the entire book.

Thank you NetGalley and Columbia University Press for providing an advance review copy.

[Donna Parker · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s no doubt Reading Style: A Life in Sentences by Jenny Davidson (Columbia University Press) is an eloquent, methodical, and meticulous book, I would expect no less from this brilliant historian, professor, and author, but for me it was hit and miss.
The fault may well be mine in unconsciously comparing Reading Style to Davidson’s dissertation, later published as a book, Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness: Manners and Morals from Locke to Austen (Columbia University Press).
Some parts of Reading Style were quite riveting while others failed to capture my attention. In hindsight, I realize this could be due to the subject matter. When Davidson was talking about some of my favourite authors I was more interested, others, not so much.
Davidson’s fictional works, The Explosionist and Invisible Things are incongruous yet absorbing reads.
I’m just not a huge fan of literary criticism. The problem isn’t literary criticism so much as the condescension involved, as though a select few are the only people on the planet who can possibly shed light on what authors really meant. Yet I suppose it’s like any criticism, it’s all about interpretation.

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like so much "The books about books", why they not only allow me to discover a lot of new authors, but also often reveal things about the books I read, that I had never noticed or that I had not paid enough attention.
This book also divides the novels in particular categories and allowed me to understand how authors that are very far between each others, often had many similarities.

I libri che parlano di libri mi piacciono tantissimo, perché non solo mi permettono di scoprire tantissimi nuovi autori, ma anche rivelano spessissimo cose di libri che ho letto ma che non avevo mai notato o a cui non avevo prestato sufficiente attenzione.
Questo libro inoltre suddivide i romanzi in particolari categorie e mi ha permesso di comprendere come autori molto lontani tra loro, spesso avevano molte somiglianze.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS FOR THE PREVIEW!

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jenny Davidson is one of my favorite critics, someone who is able to find the most rigorous elements of journalistic criticism and the most illuminating features of academic criticism, and without strain combine them. I wish very much that she would write many more books in this vein. Although she could write more like Breeding and that would make me happy, too.

[Leon]

read chapter 3: “Mouthy Pleasures and the Problem of Momentum. Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Lethem”

[Eustacia Tan · Rating 4 out of 5]

*3.5 Stars*

I think all of us have experienced this before. Sometimes, when we're reading, we come across a passage that moves us, even though we don't know why. While there are many many passages, there's one quote that moved an entire cohort:

"I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane." (Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury)

It's probably because we read this book while we were sixteen, but it impacted us more than what a school book normally would. I think it taught us that it's ok, normal even, to be very different from the norm.

So it was with great excitement that I started reading Reading Style: A Life in Sentences. This book is about examining how style impacts writing and it's emotional impact on the reader. Through a wide range of authors, from Anthony Burgess to George Eliot, Austen and even Stephen King, the author explores writing style. What makes this book different from a normal literary textbook is that the author's reading life and the impact these books have had on her is a focus of this book.

What I liked about this book is that the author doesn't claim to be The Authority when it comes to literature. She says that "it would be absurd to construe my preferences as objective verdicts on the respective merits of those two [books]". I heartily concur with this.

However, I found this book a bit hard to understand. Sometimes I don't know what the author is saying or why she finds it beautiful, but the passage is beautiful it makes me want to cry because I want to know more. Also, it makes me feel stupid that I have no idea what's going on. Of course, this is probably because I haven't touched literature in two years and even when I was studying literature, I found things like "theme" and "character" easier to understand than "diction".

If you're a literature student (or have some knowledge of literature) wanting to go deeper into writing style, this is the book for you. If you're a casual reader, well, it's worth picking up this book, but don't expect to be able to breeze through it.

Disclaimer: I got a free copy from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for a free and honest review.

This review was first posted at Inside the mind of a Bibliophile

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author Jenny Davidson is both an English and Comparative Literature professor and an inveterate reader. She reads everything from classics to old but forgotten books, from high-brow literature to popular novels. Reading Style is a mix of all of these things. Although it refers to some literary theory, the author explains early on that what informed her decisions to talk about specific books was not a desire to”[make] an argument about style” but to share passages that “speak to [her] strongly.”

Lately I’ve been loving books about books and books about people who loves books. In many ways, Reading Style did not disappoint. Author Jenny Davidson is fun and passionate and clearly very much in love with the written word. Sharing her passion for particular sentences and writing styles was generally enjoyable. There were a few sections where she focused on authors who weren’t to my taste and I was surprised how much this could make a section drag. Perhaps this shouldn’t have surprised me though, given how liberally she quoted and how much my enjoyment of the book depended on entering into her enthusiasm. When I wasn’t loving the authors she was sharing, I often enjoyed the thought-provoking points she raised about the merits of style and substance in literature.

Even though I’m someone who enjoys thinking about the roles literature plays in our lives, the author sometimes waxed a bit too philosophical for me. In the age old criticism of literary criticism, it’s fair to say that I sometimes felt the author was investing too much meaning in the text she shared. I also sometimes found her writing very dense and hard to follow. Unfortunately, two of the last chapters were focused on authors I didn’t enjoy. They were also some of the trickier chapters to get through. As a result, I finished the book feeling very ready to be done with it. However, parts of the book were truly fantastic and if you’re someone who loves beautiful writing, I’d recommend giving this a shot.

This review first published on Doing Dewey.

[Jeff Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jenny Davidson’s book Reading Style is a pleasure cruise through some of her favorite works and why they are popular. At times it is (self-admittingly ) a bit dense to get through. Most of the works are classic works from the 19th and 20th century with only a hint of current literature near the end. As a result, it can read like that introduction to poetry book that they rip out in the movie Dead Poets Society. If one can parse through that aspect of the book, we can find Davidson’s true passion for literature and why she gets so excited about it. Anyone who would love to just talk shop about books they love and why would enjoy the work and Davidson’s passion really shows through.

Davidson discusses the books she loved as a child and how they formed her interests as an adult. The first and last chapters cover this area thoroughly and are the most entertaining for book nerds. In many parts, the writing gets very bogged down into the breakdown of a sentence or why a certain word works and doesn’t work in that sentence. She does ask the reader to skip certain sections of her over-analysis if they are not interested. It would certainly fit for a class on the topic, but even then, too precise for what she is trying to accomplish.

The one thing this book did for me was introduce me to twentieth century fiction that I have heard about, but never explored. I want to pick up books by George Perec, Sebald, and Karl Ove Knausgaard, but it was generally tough to get through the book in many parts. Outside of a class, the review is interesting, but it doesn’t seem to get to a point in the over-analysis. It is a tour through high-literary society with an over examination of the rose we are to smell.

[Maurynne Maxwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended for intellectuals, academics, and poets. Jenny Davidson is an academic and has chosen that language for her book, so that does limit the readership. Especially for a book purporting to concentrate on the art of the sentence as a springboard to literary appreciation, I was hoping for a book with the range and excitement of Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, or Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn!, where the examination of a work lights a fire within the author that's then passed on to the reader. That blaze is not here, but persistence brings a slow, warm glow.

The author lets us know she reads popular literature (Stephen King, Julia Glass, Dick Francis) but the works she chooses to highlight, and thus her own sentences, are dense, chewy, convoluted. (Proust, James, Eliot, Austen, etc.) Also, kindle formatting sucks, so it's hard to tell what awkwardness belongs to the author and what to the software engineer--transitions are sometimes without a colon or line break, mostly without quotes, never italics; the mechanics of reading matter. There is a lovely sensual element to Davidson's writing and reading of texts that implies and exploits a synesthestic approach to reading, empowers literature as experience.

Criticism becomes discernment in Davidson's deft hands, and she does transmit her pleasure in the reading, the works, and the language(s). Very fun, but in no way light reading! Made me want to revisit James, Austen, and Proust.
Thanks to Columbia UP and netgalley for the e-galley for review.

[Kandace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Author
Jenny Davidson

Publication Date
June 24, 2014

Synopsis
Critic, professor, and reader Jenny Davidson delves into what shapes reading preferences and the mechanics behind it.

High Points
Davidson breaks down reading style to it's barest form: the sentence level. Although she explores the means by which reading preferences are shaped (ie age, experience, colloquial style, etc), she emphasizes that all this occurs predominately at the sentence level. Davidson shares plenty of examples throughout the text to illustrate her meaning.
Low Points
The reader concerned with the overall feelings of a book will not enjoy the in-depth analysis at the sentence level. If you are not passionate about words and sentence structure, this book is tedious at best. To claim that is is a memoir is a huge stretch. There are some lovely little personal stories, but not nearly enough to constitute a memoir.

You'll love it if...
...you are the writerly type. ...looking to expand your To Be Read list.

Overall
4 Stars

E-Galley received from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. For more reviews by the Readist, please visit www.thereadist.com.

[Jason Furman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Style conveys Jenny Davidson's enormous passion for a wide range of books in a style that befits her subject. Davidson starts with Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels (which helped guide much of my reading twenty-five years ago) and then organized by types of sentences--like "mouthy pleasures" (Gary Lutz, Lolita, Lydia Davis, Jonathan Letham) and "disordered sentences" (Georges Perec, Roland Barthes, Wayne Koestenbaum, Luc Sante). Her focus is on style and it is illustrated with extensive, extended block quotes, but the book ranges widely. Ultimately, it is an homage to literature as pleasure rather than as a form of self improvement. And it is particularly an homage to being absorbed in the worlds created by books, especially by long novels. It is also a reminder that I should really read Clarissa.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author takes you through her favorite, and some of her least favorite, book passages and quotations, dissecting them to explore why theytn speak to her. A fun exercise, but a bit too dense and with too many authors/works I haven't read for my personal taste. I'd still recommend for people interested in what other people read, anyone with a love of language generally, and language scholars specifically. Though I disagreed with or couldn't see how she arrived at some of her conclusions, I still enjoyed reading her thought process.

Disclaimer: I received a galley through NetGalley to review for the Morningside Muckraker

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a lovely alternative to style books of the pedantic nature, and it also provides different insight into style than a collection that attempted to review/catalog a more exhaustive history would. Instead, focusing on the particular writers (via their most arresting passages and sentences) who animate Davidson's own interest in style, this book becomes both a biography of a voracious reader's preferences, as well as a lovely introduction to the types of reading that might produce similar assessments for any reader.

[Ginny Gallagher · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book was very well written but was overwhelming with all the different authors and literary works discussed. It read more like a textbook than a casual discussion and I found a lot of the writing hard to follow. I'm not sure this is the best book for a casual reader but might be something someone studying literature would enjoy.

[Linda]

LJ

[Lanie Tankard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's my review:

http://richardgilbert.me/a-salute-to-...

[Julier · Rating 1 out of 5]

Too hard for me to get into.

[Jess · Rating 3 out of 5]

A slim, nice entry into the genre of memoirs about reading.