How to read and why / Harold Bloom.

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.