Despite its somewhat prescriptive subtitle, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s Look Closer is a glorious reminder of why reading for pleasure is so central to human flourishing. Yet the idea that reading books should be a necessary part of daily life is now receding. It’s not that we have stopped reading altogether, but the tide of short-form information that seems impossible to avoid has largely obscured the extraordinary pliancy and possibilities of written language. The deep and concentrated plunge into novels and poems that was once a mandatory pleasure even for children now seems too much like hard work. And as Douglas-Fairhurst shows, great writing, the kind that makes us recognise our own feelings by stepping into the lives and minds of others, is about ambivalence and ambiguity, allusions and suggestiveness. The more we read, the more we can recognise the deeper, stranger currents that flow beneath narrative and life.

Douglas-Fairhurst, a professor of English literature at Oxford, draws on a huge range of novels and poems to make the case for close reading. He also goes down some delightfully discursive rabbit holes (he is particularly good on the weird ‘slipperiness’ of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, about which he has written previously). A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad is also part of the throng, as are Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Jane Austen’s Emma, Tennyson’s In Memoriam, James Joyce’s Dubliners, Wendy Cope’s ‘The Orange’, Edith Wharton’s short story ‘The Pretext’, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal (with its creepily unreliable narrator). Douglas-Fairhurst exhorts us to look properly at poems that have grown stale with overfamiliarity; we revisit Words­worth’s host of daffodils and William Carlos Williams’s plums in the icebox. He quotes Don Paterson’s observation that the poem ‘is a little machine for remembering itself’, and muses on poetry’s capacity to crystallise experience and transform loss. I can’t recall reading a book that made me so immediately want to dive straight into a library; I also felt impelled to return to works I thought I knew but on which Douglas-Fairhurst has reangled the light.

Chapters cover topics including character, dialogue, sex, fear (and its attraction), perspectives (there’s an exquisite analysis of the moment in Emma when Mr Knightley proposes), the importance of names and the way that a novelist such as George Eliot can concentrate on something humdrum and ordinary, like a string of