Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, an English literature professor at the University of Oxford, reveals his love of reading with his students, and collating twenty years of teaching, his book Look Closer explores the iconic works of literature that have formed, sustained and entertained him, from timesless classics like Wuthering Heights and Dracula to modern masterpieces like Normal People and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as children’s books, poetry, plays, short stories, and even comics.

Douglas-Fairhurst explains how to slow down, take note and bring a text to life, Look Closer makes clear how literature works and why in these turbulent times, reading is more relevant than ever. The plight of Adams’s space tourist, is shared by the time pressed, attention-straitened 21^st century reader. The smartphone may have taken place of an interstellar guidebook.

Douglas-Fairhurst suggests, reading “can give us new ideas to think about and extra resources to think with”.  He cites Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,  where the experience of motoring though London is captured in verbal freeze and shows how Woolf’s is able to make us feel as if we are in the car with Orlando. He argues “Woolf provide us with both the thrill of life breaking up into fragments and the reassurance of someone piecing it back together again.”

He also demonstrates  the way in which form creates meaning in poetry by stripping it out of a verse by AE Housman; later he has fun with the winners of the literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction award in order to suggest some of the ways in which words on a page can- and cannot- conjure the experience of the body into imaginative being.

Douglas-Fairhurst suggests while literature does not show us the thing of which it writes, but allows us, to “use the clues provided by the author to create this world for ourselves”.

Look Closer is  a celebration of the simple joy of reading, and how becoming more attentive readers can open up worlds and bring us closer to ourselves in delightful and unexpected ways.

Look Closer: How to Get More Out of Reading by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, Fern Press £20, 352 pages.