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Harold Bloom's urgency in How to Read and Why may have much to do with his age. He brackets his combative, inspiring manual with the news that he is nearing 70 and hasn't time for the mediocre. (One doubts that he ever did.) Nor will he countenance such fashionable notions as the death of the author or abide "the vagaries of our current counter-Puritanism" let alone "ideological cheerleading." Successively exploring the short story, poetry, the novel, and drama, Bloom illuminates both the how and why of his title and points us in all the right directions: toward the Romantics because they "startle us out of our sleep-of-death into a more capacious sense of life"; toward Austen, James, Proust; toward Thomas Mann, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy; toward Cervantes and Shakespeare (but of course!), Ibsen and Oscar Wilde.
How should we read? Slowly, with love, openness, and with our inner ear cocked. Then we should reread, reread, reread, and do so aloud as often as possible. "As a boy of eight," he tells us, "I would walk about chanting Housman's and William Blake's lyrics to myself, and I still do, less frequently yet with undiminished fervor." And why should we engage in this apparently solitary activity? To increase our wit and imagination, our sense of intimacy--in short, our entire consciousness--and also to heal our pain. "Until you become yourself," Bloom avers, "what benefit can you be to others." So much for reading as an escape from the self!
Still, many of this volume's pleasures may indeed be selfish. The author is at his best when he is thinking aloud and anew, and his material offers him--and therefore us--endless opportunities for discovery. Bloom cherishes poetry because it is "a prophetic mode" and fiction for its wisdom. Intriguingly, he fears more for the fate of the latter: "Novels require more readers than poems do, a statement so odd that it puzzles me, even as I agree with it." We must, he adjures, crusade against its possible extinction and read novels "in the coming years of the third millennium, as they were read in the eighteenth and nineteenth century: for aesthetic pleasure and for spiritual insight."
Bloom is never heavy, since his vision quest contains a healthy love of irony--Jedediah Purdy, take note: "Strip irony away from reading, and it loses at once all discipline and all surprise." And this supreme critic makes us want to equal his reading prowess because he writes as well as he reads; his epigrams are equal to his opinions. He is also a master allusionist and quoter. His section on Hedda Gabler is preceded by three extraordinary statements, two from Ibsen, who insists, "There must be a troll in what I write." Who would not want to proceed? Of course, Bloom can also accomplish his goal by sheer obstinacy. As far as he is concerned, Don Quixote may have been the first novel but it remains to this day the best one. Is he perhaps tweaking us into reading this gigantic masterwork by such bald overstatement? Bloom knows full well that a prophet should stop at nothing to get his belief and love across, and throughout How to Read and Why he is as unstinting as the visionary company he adores. --Kerry Fried
From Publishers Weekly
This aesthetic self-help manual is a reliably idiosyncratic guide to what Yale literary critic Bloom calls "the most healing of pleasures"A reading well. In chapters that focus on short stories, poems, novels and plays, Bloom takes readers on a swift but satisfying joyride through the West's most outrageous, original and exuberant textsAclassics by Chekhov, Flannery O'Connor, Borges, Dickinson, Proust, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison, among others. Unconventionally organized by literary genre, his text is passionately anecdotal and observant. By asking great questionsA"Why does Lady Bracknell delight us so much?"; "How does one read a short story?"ABloom hopes to influence our reading lists and habits. He gives some texts, such as Moby-Dick, almost cursory treatment; others he discusses at length. Fans of his bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) will find the lengthy discussion of Hamlet here to be a kind of coda. Overall, this book is a testament to Bloom's view that reading is above all a pleasurably therapeutic event. "Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness," he notes, reminding us of what's inexhaustible about writers such as Whitman and Borges and attesting to the satisfaction that literary texts offer our solitary selves. (June) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In the tradition of Mortimer Adler's How To Read a Book and Clifton Fadiman's Lifetime Reading Plan, the indefatigable and irascible Bloom (Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human) offers his apologia for the art of reading well. Greatly saddened by contemporary academic criticism, where the "appreciation of Victorian women's underwear has replaced the appreciation of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning," Bloom stridently argues that "we read in order to strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests." For Bloom, as for his critical forbears Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, reading is a solitary act that fills life with zest and insight. He suggests five guiding principles for the restoration of reading and applies these principles to short stories, poems, plays, and novels. Each brief analysis is a finely crafted meditation on the power of great literature, and Bloom's assiduous interpretations of the works of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and Stendhal, among others, will send readers running to the books themselves. Although Bloom's use of Shakespeare as a touchstone for his "canon" of great literature is sure to be controversial, his book presents a forceful argument for the power and delight of reading deeply. Highly recommended.---Henry Carrigan, Lancaster, PA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The New York Times Book Review, Michael Gorra
Every few pages Bloom startles with a wild surmise; quotes a passage in a way that makes you fall under its spell; offers an invaluable throwaway comment on, say, the difficulties of Milton or Dickens's sense of audience.
From Booklist
Bloom, the best-known literary critic of our time, shares his extensive knowledge of and profound joy in the works of a constellation of major writers, including Shakespeare, Cervantes, Austen, Dickinson, Melville, Wilde, and O'Connor in this eloquent invitation to readers to read and read well. Why read? Because "reading is the most healing of pleasures." How to read? Bloom offers a set of cogent principles, which includes the all-important reminder to free the mind of all ideology and cant and experience each literary creation on its own terms. He then lights the way in expert and passionate interpretations of short stories--grouping them in two schools: the Chekhovian (impressionistic) and the Borgesian (phantasmagorical)--poetry, "the crown of imaginative literature"; plays; and novels. Every analytical performance is exhilarating, and his essay on Proust is one of the most beautiful and insightful tributes to the restorative powers of literature ever written. Bloom's clear vision and abiding humanity support his belief that "only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Kirkus Reviews
The prolific critic Bloom (Shakespeare, 1998, etc.) has courted controversy in the last few years with his denunciations of the politically correct School of Resentment that now dominates most universities--and he has not been discreet in his attacks on many of the writers (such as Toni Morrison) that this school holds in highest esteem. Here, he carries his arguments to an even more fundamental level, demanding that we consider what the point and purpose of literature can be in an age where information has gone far beyond the verbal forms in which literature subsides. Information is endlessly available to us, he points out, where shall wisdom be found? Naturally, Bloom finds it in the great writers of the Western tradition, and he proceeds to tell us just how great they (i.e., Hemingway, Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austen, Dickens, Chekhov, Cervantes, etc.) are--and why. As with most of Bloom's more recent works, the great controversy here is not what he says, but whom he chooses to say it about, and the many debates that he will set off are likely not to get past his table of contents. Which will be a pity, frankly, because Bloom's insights into just about anything can be worth all of his postures. A molehill of old lectures--some of them brilliant, all of them at least worth skimming through--that will probably get made into a mountain of academic politics. -- Copyright © 2000 Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
John Banville The Irish Times Bloom is one of the last...of his kind...one of the greatest educators of our time...Wonderful...Bloom writes with passion of those writers whom he loves, and whose work for him affirms life.
Book Description
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.
About the Author
Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. His more than twenty books include Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, The Western Canon, The Book of J, and his most recent work, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages. He is a MacArthur Prize fellow; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the recipient of many awards, including the Academy's Gold Medal for Criticism; and he holds honorary degrees from the universities of Rome and Bologna.
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