Top ten books about books

John Sutherland is the Lord Northcliffe professor emeritus of Modern English Literature at UCL and author of the new book, 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need to Know.

For the Guardian, he named his top ten books about books, including:

Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in this Class? (1980)

Winner of the wittiest title ever coined for a book on lit-crit (the question was initially asked by an artless student in his seminar). Fish's simple/hard questions: what's the difference between a "text" and a "work of literature"? How, when the best seminars tend to finish with more disagreement than they started with, do we reach a consensus reading of any text? Is there any such thing?

Read about the other books on Sutherland's list.

Learn more about Sutherland's list of the best books about listing.

--Marshal Zeringue