The sayings of Doctor Tom

This book has serious shelf life — pun intended.

A dozen years after Thomas C. Foster published “How to Read Literature Like a Professor,” it is still hanging around on The New York Times’ Best Sellers list, sitting at No. 2 in the education category. Not bad place for a book which was partially written out of desperation.

The inspiration for the book came in 2000, while Foster was on sabbatical from the University of Michigan-Flint, where he taught for 27 years. Sipping coffee at a local Biggby Coffee, Foster told City Pulse about how he was nearing the end of a sabbatical with nothing to show for it. He had planned to write about Irish poets, but was getting nowhere.

“It was going to be a whale — literary pun intended — of a poor letter,” he said, referring to the letter that is traditionally written to administration upon completion of a sabbatical.

But then he had an idea.

“I remembered a couple of my students saying they were going to write a book on the sayings of Dr. Tom,” he said.

It’s those sayings, such as “Every trip is a quest,” that ended up being the foundation for his book.

As the end of his sabbatical neared, Foster hurriedly wrote a chapter and sent it off to a publisher, starting his own personal quest.

While it’s an easy presumption to make that Foster wrote the book for incoming freshmen, he actually had an entirely different student in mind.

“In my head and on paper I had written the book for a 37-year-old divorced woman who had come back to school for her nursing degree,” he said.

At the time, Foster said, UM-Flint students were older — he estimated an average age of 26 — and featured a large number of licensed practical nurses seeking to become registered nurses and laid-off auto workers.

“Both types were really good students,” he said.

As he wrote the first chapter Foster remembers thinking, “This is easy.” After all, he was just putting his lectures in book form. But then, he said, “It got harder. A lot harder.”

The book’s sales grew slowly at first, but then picked up rapidly when it was discovered by advanced placement English teachers. The book is different from other literary criticism books that, according to Foster, list a bunch of questions which he said “are invariably not my questions.”

Foster’s book, with playful chapter titles like “It’s Greek to Me,” “When in Doubt,” “It’s Shakespeare” and the often dog-eared chapter, “It’s All About Sex” — are light, breezy and often very funny. This approach makes literature more easy for students to digest and understand.

In the chapter “Marked for Greatness,” he starts with “Quasimodo is a hunchback,” and then marches into a discussion about “markings” on literary characters — such as Richard III’s famous scoliosis and Oedipus’ “wounded feet.”

Foster said his book gets “maximum exposure” in the 12th grade. At that point, he said, most students have read enough to start seeing patterns in literature.

“Before then, readers are inadequate or not self-assured enough to recognize all the names and titles (of books),” he said.

Since writing “How to Read Literature Like a Professor,” Foster has written two other related titles: “How to Read Novels Like a Professor” and “Twenty-Five Books that Shaped America.” He is currently working on “Reading the Silver Screen,” a book that will dissect movies in a similar fashion.

He has also written in-depth books on authors Seamus Heaney and John Fowles, as well as the more rigid “Form and Society in Modern Literature.”

Interestingly, Foster has never assigned his “How to Read” books in his own classes.

“What would I say? The books contain all my observations and jokes,” he said.

For example, in his chapter “ ... Except Sex” he takes this playful jab at contemporary literature: “I honestly believe that if D.H. Lawrence could see the sorry state of sex scenes that developed within a generations of his death, he would retract “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.”’