How to Read and WhyInformation 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. |
Contents
Preface | 19 |
SHORT STORIES | 31 |
Guy de Maupassant | 42 |
Flannery OConnor | 51 |
Vladimir Nabokov | 54 |
Tommaso Landolfi | 60 |
POEMS | 69 |
Robert Browning | 79 |
Great Expectations | 162 |
The Portrait of a Lady | 173 |
In Search of Lost Time | 181 |
The Magic Mountain | 187 |
Summary Observations | 193 |
PLAYS | 199 |
Hedda Gabler | 218 |
The Importance of Being Earnest | 224 |
Walt Whitman | 88 |
Dickinson Brontë Popular Ballads and Tom OBedlam | 94 |
William Shakespeare | 110 |
John Milton | 116 |
Samuel Taylor Coleridge | 124 |
Summary Observations | 138 |
Don Quixote | 145 |
Emma | 156 |
Summary Observations | 231 |
As I Lay Dying | 239 |
Miss Lonelyhearts | 245 |
Blood Meridian | 254 |
Invisible Man | 263 |
Song of Solomon | 269 |
Completing the Work | 277 |
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Common terms and phrases
aesthetic Ahab Akiba American Austen ballad beautiful become Blood Meridian Borges Bundren Castorp Cervantes characters Charterhouse Charterhouse of Parma Chekhov child consciousness Crying of Lot D. H. Lawrence death Dickens Dickinson Don Quixote Dostoevsky Ellison Emerson Emily Emma erotic Falstaff Faulkner final Gina Gogol Gurov Hamlet Hedda Gabler Hemingway Henry James Horla human Iago Ibsen imagination Invisible ironic irony Isabel Archer Judge Holden Kasyan Lady Bracknell Lay Dying literary lost lover lyric madness Magic Mountain Maupassant McCarthy Milton Miss Lonelyhearts Moby-Dick narrator never novel novelist O'Connor Oedipa Osmond parody passion perhaps play pleasure poem poet poetry Prince Prince Hamlet protagonist Proust Pynchon quest Raskolnikov reader reality rereading Sancho Satan Search of Lost seems sexual Shakespeare short story Sonnets spirit stanza Stendhal sublime superb Svidrigailov Tarphon tells Tennyson's Tlön Tom O'Bedlam tragedy Tristero Turgenev Ulysses vision visionary Whitman Wilde Wilde's writer