Summary and Reviews of How To Read And Why by Harold Bloom

Media Reviews

The New York Observer - Adam Begley Why read Bloom? Because Bloom at his best, when you watch over his shoulder as he makes meaning out of the lines of a poem, is a wizard. Because even bad Bloom trails sparks of brilliance. Because he does insist in a world where judging by taste is shunned as invidious, on the importance of aesthetic choice. And because his trademark mantra about how to read, There is no method except yourself--a mantra he was repeating to his students decades before the word best seller ever flashed through his outsize brain--is a bold liberation from the airless squeeze of the classroom and a thrilling challenge to any reader who yearns to make the self stronger.

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.

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 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. .... 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.

Booklist - Donna Seaman 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. .... Bloom's clear vision and abiding humanity support his belief that only deep, constant reading fully establishes and augments an autonomous self.

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...... 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.

Publishers Weekly 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.