The Inception of books (have a totem handy).

Back in college, my literary theory professor talked my class through a whole bunch of theoretical approaches to texts, including historical criticism, formalism/New Criticism, Reader-Response Criticism, etc., etc. You get the idea. At one point, he mentioned that Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller would make an excellent companion to our semester. I bought the book and promptly didn’t read it. But now that I have, I really wonder why we weren’t required to read it in his class. This is exactly the kind of book ripe for beginning literary critics to examine. Full review and Inception references found here.