How to Read and Why

A new book by America’s leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom’s manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.

Harold Bloom, one of the great literary critics and champion of written culture, asserts that we read in order to better understand and fortify our sense of our own individuality. In this essential book he offers a reading list of works, some famous, some less well-known, that allows readers to fully explore dimensions of themselves. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why reveals that the close reading and re-reading of great literature can sustain, enrich and strengthen every aspect of our own lives.

A new book by America’s leading literary critic on the uses of deep reading. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why is Bloom’s manifesto for the preponderance of written culture.

In the vastly influential The Western Canon, Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand a greater depth of the individual self. How to Read and Why continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain deeper self-awareness. Poems, stories, novels, plays and parables are all analysed as forms of writing as immersion, the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeare’s sonnets, the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes, the novels of Proust and Calvino, Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex and Mark’s Gospel. Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of why we read: increased individuality, respite from visual bombardment, a return to ‘deep feeling’ and ‘deep thinking’.

How to Read and Why is an essential book for any reader, an introduction to the world of written culture, an inspirational self-help book for students and teachers alike.