The Fourteen Lectures in the Modern Scholar's The Art of Reading by Professor Joseph Luzzi are:

1. A Fig Tree of One's Own: The Worlds of Reading

2. Mind of Metaphor [Metaphor and its effect on the mind of the reader]

3. Hearing Voices: Allusion and Echo

4. Languages, Dead and Living

5. That Vision Thing

6. Reading, Rewriting

7. Real and Unreal Characters

8. Reading Outside the Book

9. Reading the Past: The Literature of Anachronism

10. By Heart

11. The Ends of Poetry [Poems and their endings]

12. Child's Play

13. Surfing the Web -- Medieval Style

14. Tips and Tools: A Reader's Guide

Prof. Luzzi obviously cares deeply about reading. Among other things, he advocates learning another language so one may read translated works in their original. He says they're not the same. I have only a smattering each of French, Japanese, and Spanish, but they have been enough for me to sometimes tell that a translated line does not match the original. I also remember helping English as a Second Language comic book fans know which of several meanings of an English word in a caption box or word balloon is meant. I've read that the reason Jules Verne has a higher reputation in France than in English-speaking countries is that English translator didn't do a good job. In short, the good professor has a point.

Professor Luzzi also recommends reading without distractions. One of his commandments of reading is not to skim. Again, he has a point. There's a scene in a book that never made sense to me until the time I decided to reread it carefully. It turned out that I had been repeatedly missing a crucial sentence.

Unsurprisingly, given that Prof. Luzzi teaches Italian studies, many of his examples are from Italian works. The two I'd heard about before were Dante's Divine Comedy and Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio.

I enjoyed the lecture on real and unreal characters particularly. Characters can become real to readers, to the extent that authors may discover they have to deal with enraged fans who hate what happens to a favorite.

Strangely, Prof. Luzzi's remarks on the loss of storytellers and reading aloud didn't mention audio books. Do teens no longer exchange "escaped homicidal maniac" stories and other urban legends? I can personally attest that reading aloud is fun if you're used to it. Luckily, my family had the habit.

There's more about the interaction between the words and the reader and how a book might change one's life. I don't know if these lectures will change a non-reader's mind, but those who already love reading might enjoy them. ( )