Rating: 
Summary: How to Pretentious, and get paid for it.
Review: I realize that Mr.Bloom is a very erudite individual, vastly more educated than myself, but erudition and education are no excuse for a pompous, narrow minded view of the pleasures to be gained by reading. His prose is at times crisp, yet his reasoning wanders about like somnambulist on a treadmill. He offers a few valid reasons for reading, self-improvement, self-knowledge, etc. His best point, one that I as a former Lit. major wholeheartedly agree with, is his belief that each book speaks differntly to each reader. He rails against the learning institutions who prescribe what readers should take from each novel, yet he then precedes to thrust his own set of reading tenets to readers as a type of reading ten commandments. He tells readers to let the book come to them, then tells them what they should get out of an array of classic works. His bias against anything not written by authors long since dead is, at times amusing, at others sad and sickening. Despite what Bloom and his ilk in the critic buisness would have you believe, the twentieth century did turn out at least one or two decent books, this however is not one of them. He is at turns pedantic, preachy, and incoherent. He tells his readers to have an open mind, then he bashes Poe with glee. This alone makes one wonder just how open Mr.Bloom is to readers 'finding' books. He is coloring their preception with his discolored views. He may hate Poe, deplore his prose styling, despise his grammar and verb usage, but he passes this of as scripture not his conjecture, thus hamstringing his points. His gushingly lavish praise for Shakespeare is, just as narrow viewed as his distaste for Poe. Yes, the Bard was a wonderful talent, a genius, one of a kind. Yet, despite what Mr.Bloom would have you believe, his works were, at least in my humble opinion, not all masterpieces. Sadly, instead of offering a book on the pleasures and joys of the written word, what Mr.Bloom offers up is a crumdgeonly view of literature. Pass this one up and let another book come to you.
Rating: 
Summary: This Brontosaurus Bardolater
Review: If you wake up every morning to lethargy, being unsure whether or not your day will include the latest Survivor or Must See TV, its time you did yourself the favor and purchased How to Read and Why by the fabulous Sterling Professor of Humanites at Yale, Harold Bloom. Bloom's premise is simple, in this new technological era, information is endlessly available to us, but not necessarily wisdom. He proposes a sort of guide book to help us find true wisdom amongst all of the fluff we're regularly exposed to in modern times. The wisdom is found in wisdom literature amongst a genre he refers to as imaginative. The book weaves a tremendous path featuring Shakespeare, Hemingway, Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Keats, Shelley, Dickinson, Stendhal and on and on and on. Naturally, Bloom breathes most life into his beloved Bard from Stratford. The chapter about Hamlet steals the show most magnificently urging you to read once again the greatest story of our time.
Rating: 
Summary: Inside the Mind of a Thoughtful Reader
Review: How to Read and Why is an excellent and interesting book about literature, but the contents have relatively little to do with the title. As I always do when the title is misleading, I rated the book down one star. If the book had a more accurate title (something like How I Enjoy Literature), I would have happily rated the book with five stars. On the other hand, I am indebted to the title because I might not have read the book otherwise. Because of that benefit, I was tempted to revise my rating to five stars. But I felt a need to be consistent in my grading that may be "the hobgoblin of little minds." Having avoided all literature classes after high school but having much enjoyed the great literature I have read, I was interested in a book that would expand my ability to perceive and benefit from fine literature. What I found was useful in that regard, but less so than a fuller treatment might have been. Let me explain what is in the book, and then go on to what is not. This book is organized into five major parts: Short Stories; Poems; Novels, Part I; Plays; and Novels, Part II. The format for each is an introduction about Professor Bloom's choice of literature to consider, then a series of short sections that analyze a few passages from each work, followed by a summary that puts the works into themes and connects those themes to the benefits that a reader may seek. The major exception is the poetry section which does provide readers with guidance on how to read: On first reading, use an annotated guide to explain the words and the allusions (what I assume he means by mediation); read aloud; reread; memorize; and recite aloud when the poetry strikes you as relevant to the situation or the moment. I suspect that more than poetry would benefit from this approach. Ulysses is a case in point. In the preface, he encourages us to embrace literature directly in other cases. He is very concerned that the philososphy of the day may divert our attention from the subjective lessons otherwise from within ourselves. He often repeats that written words are more than marks on paper, that the feelings evoked are more important than the things described, and that literature creates the possibility of expanding our ability to communicate and to appreciate. He seems to be a bit discouraged about trends in readership, citing concerns about whether good novels will be able to sustain the necessary audience to support their continuance. What I found most beneficial about the book were his descriptions of works that I had not read before. I considered it a great treat to learn his views about what he enjoys and why, among all of the vast amounts of literature that he must have read. From this, I was able to locate literary works that I would like to explore. So think of this aspect of the book as being like an outstanding Amazon.com reader review. Except, of course, he has vastly more knowledge and skill at this than do any reviewers I have read on-line. The second most beneficial part of the book was his creation of themes in literature, as he perceives them. While one may or may not agree with those themes (they are very simple), they certainly do add another element to consider when one reads a given work. On the works themselves, you may (if you are like me) disagree with his reading in a particular case. That's perfectly fine with him. In fact, reading his interpretations of a passage after developing my own created a sort of mental dialogue between us that I found interesting. If I ever meet Professor Bloom, we would have a great deal to discuss in an enjoyable fashion. In fact, given that this is a popular book, I suggest you read it in part because you can then use it as a Rosetta Stone of sorts to compare your views with others who have also read it. That would be much more enjoyable than most of what people who have just met discuss at cocktail parties. As Professor Bloom points out, a common theme in literature is the inability of people to communicate to one another . . . because they do not listen. I have two primary regrets about this book (other than wishing he had included more of his favorite works). One, that Professor Bloom did not personalize the book more. He might have explained how his life's decisions and actions were affected by literature in critical instances. Two, that Professor Bloom ignored other forms of writing such as essays and nonfiction books. I assume he reads both, and I wish to know what he likes and why. In other words, I would wish to know Professor Bloom better through his book. I was attracted to the parts of his personality I became acquainted with and would have liked to have continued the conversation in my mind. Enjoy this book, be enhanced by remembering the works he describes that you like, and delight in, the works that you will read because you learned more about them here!
Rating:
Summary: Master at Work...
Review: Good book, if I had written it - it would have been a great book. But the expectations for Bloom are so high. Everything he writes is worth the effort. It is a better outline of what to read, than how or why. Shakespeare is in a dimension beyond the rest of us, if you realize that now, then some of the book will be redundant. I've read this book twice and got those books he recommended that I didn't have, so that is the finest compliment you can give any book.
Rating:
Summary: A Very Convincing Argument
Review: Before he was even eight years old, Harold Bloom could chant the verses of Blake and Housman. This is more of an accomplishment than it might seem when one considers what Bloom was saying: "O rose, thou art sick!/The invisible word/That flies in the night/In the howling storm/Has found out thy bed/Of crimson joy,/And his dark secret love/Does thy life destroy." Although these lyrics remain wonderful poetry, they are not what the usual eight-year old boy chooses to commit to memory. At the age of seventy, when this book was written, Bloom had not really changed so much from the precocious little boy he had been at eight. He was still chanting, still being pretentious and showy and he was still the world's premier reader. I don't know if Bloom was great fun when he was eight but he was certainly great fun at seventy. In How to Read and Why, Bloom laments the death of memorized verse, telling us that people today now read far fewer poems than they did previously and with far less attention, simply because they don't have to. But, he goes on, the very fact that we don't have to is no excuse for not doing so. He exhorts us to try harder; learn more; read better. Those who are familiar with Bloom will not be surprised to find, in this book, that he adores the poetry of eighteenth-century England. The poets writing at that time despaired of everything but a strong sense of self and its tremendous power of endurance. Bloom, himself, despairs of computers, television and anything else that draws our attention away from quality reading. Quality is the all-important key word to Bloom. Poe, Bloom tells us, wrote atrociously even though he remains immensely popular. du Maupassant, he says, wore Schopenhauerian goggles causing his short stories to be but distortions of human desire. Even those who found The Western Canon dry and joyless will find Bloom's love of great literature, in How to Read and Why, infectious. If you've never read Proust, Bloom can make you wonder why. The same for Flannery O'Conner, Italo Calvino, Cormac McCarthy, Eudora Welty and even Robert Browning. "Information is endlessly available to us;" says Bloom, "where shall wisdom be found?" It is a rhetorical question only and Bloom provides the answer: here, in this book, and in the books he praises. Although Bloom maintains that How to Read and Why is definitely not polemic, there are many, both within and without academia, who would certainly disagree. Speaking of universities in general, Bloom says, "A university culture where the appreciation of Victorian women's underwear replaces the appreciation of Charles Dickens and Robert Browning sounds like the outrageousness of a new Nathanael West, but is merely the norm...The poems of our climate have been replaced by the body stockings of our culture." You can't get much more outspoken than that. Coming from anyone but the indomitable Harold Bloom, these assertions might sound somewhat pompous. When Bloom utters them, however, they sound, not only convincing, but refreshing. "If you wish to maintain," he says, "that Shakespeare's ascendancy was a product of colonialism, then who will bother to confute you?" Who indeed? Yes, some great literary works are unthinkable without a thriving empire, although a thriving empire says nothing about a work's shortcomings as a true measure of art. Bloom rails against the collectivist, materialist demons who have all but destroyed American universities. At the same time, he champions the solitary reader, summoning the likes of Emerson, Dr. Johnson and Francis Bacon in support. The best advice, Bloom tells us, comes from Bacon: "Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider." Bloom's fifth principle for reading, the recovery of the ironic is no doubt the most convincing argument in the entire book. For Bloom, the loss of irony is a terrible thing. It signifies, for him, the death of reading as a serious pursuit and the ultimate death of civilization. Hamlet is for Bloom, the master of irony; the man who says one thing and yet always means another. No one, says Bloom, knows how to read Hamlet anymore. Anyone who reads this book should also read Philip Roth's novel, The Human Stain. Roth is nothing if he is not one hundred proof Bloom. The Ghost Writer certainly showed more than a little of The Anxiety of Influence. The Human Stain, however, is, in part, a violent critique of the coven of academic materialism so hated by Bloom. The same intelligence, the same zest for the sensual and the intellectual pervades both Bloom, in How to Read and Why and The Human Stain. Bloom seeks to marry the intellectual to the sensual in our experience of reading as a difficult pleasure, but a pleasure nonetheless. This, says Bloom, is "the Readers Sublime." It is a sublime that helps us transcend loss, despair, grief, even death. It is the ultimate reason of how we should read and, more to the point, why.
Rating: 
Summary: mistitled
Review: Big academic names also need good editors, who are a manuscript's first insightful reader and critic. That guiding hand is absent here. A book should be a complete and satisfying whole, while this is merely a collection of essays one suspects the author had written over the years, was overly fond of, so found room for them in this book. This frustrating and disappointing book has some insightful moments--especially regarding the almost forgotten art of memorizing poems to fully understand and enjoy them, but it is unfocused and unsastisying. HOW TO READ AND WHY never fulfills the title's promise, which is too bad, for that would have been a most interesting and valuable book, if it had come into being.
Rating:
Summary: Rallying cry.
Review: It's doubtful that any author of less renown would find a publisher for this quick tour of literary landmarks along with plain-spoken commentary on the art of reading. The book is meant more to entice than to educate, yet one wonders if it will find its way into the hands of the eager, novice readers Bloom must have in mind. Nonetheless, the book is a fitting complement to the author's more pessimistic, elegaic "Western Canon," and it effectively affirms the romantic-aesthetic quests of those of us who--in spite of post-structuralism, modern cultural studies, and the "politicizing" of all things aesthetic--find inexhaustible abundance in the life of art.
Rating: 
Summary: Frustrating read
Review: I am an obsessive reader, like Bloom. I share his concern for the future of reading, but found this book rather heavy-handed and platitudinous--though I wouldn't dismiss anyone who loved it either. The problem for me is that Bloom never stops to develop his insights in a useful way; the approach is scatter shot and the tone pretentious. If your mind works the same way Bloom's does and you love reading, by all means dig in. If not, caveat emptor.
Rating:
Summary: A Reader's Eye View of What Bloom Reads and Why
Review: This is an excellent and interesting book, but it has relatively little to do with the title. As I always do when the title is misleading, I rated the book down one star. If the book had a more accurate title (something like One Reader's Enjoyment of Literature), I would have happily rated the book with five stars. On the other hand, I am indebted to the title because I might not have read the book otherwise. Because of that I was tempted to revise my rating to five stars. But I felt a need to be consistent that may be "the hobgoblin of little minds." Having avoided all literature classes after high school but having enjoyed the great literature I have read, I was interested in a book that would expand my ability to perceive and benefit from fine literature. What I found was useful in that regard, but less so than a fuller treatment might have been. Let me explain what is in the book, and then go on to what is not. This book is organized into five major parts: Short Stories; Poems; Novels, Part I; Plays; and Novels, Part II. The format for each is an introduction about Professor Bloom's choice of literature to elucidate, then a series of short sections that analyze a few passages from each work, followed by a summary that puts the works into themes and connects those themes to the benefits that a reader may seek. The major exception is the poetry section which does provide readers with guidance on how to read: On first reading, use an annotated guide to explain the words and the allusions (what I assume he means by mediation); read aloud; reread; memorize; and recite aloud when the poetry strikes you as relevant to the situation or the moment. I suspect that more than poetry would benefit from this approach. Ulysses is a case in point. In the preface, he encourages us to embrace literature directly in other cases. He is very concerned that the philososphy of the day may divert our attention from the subjective lessons otherwise from within ourselves. He often repeats that written words are more than marks on paper, that the feelings evoked are more important than the things described, and that literature creates the possibility of expanding our ability to communicate and to appreciate. He seems to be a bit discouraged about trends in readership, citing concerns about whether good novels will be able to sustain the necessary audience to support their continuance. What I found most beneficial about the book were his descriptions of works that I had not read before. I considered it a great treat to learn his views about what he enjoys and why, among all of the vast amounts of literature that he must have read. From this, I was able to locate works of literature that I would like to explore. So think of this aspect of the book as being like an Amazon.com reader review. Except, of course, he has more knowledge and skill at this than do I. The second most beneficial part of the book was his creation of themes in literature, as he perceives them. While one may or may not agree with those themes (they are very simple), they certainly do add another element to consider when one reads a given work. On the works themselves, you may (if you are like me) disagree with his reading in a particular case. That's perfectly fine with him. In fact, reading his interpretations of a passage after developing my own created a sort of mental dialogue between us that I found interesting. If I ever meet Professor Bloom, we would have a great deal to discuss in an enjoyable fashion. In fact, given that this is a popular book, I suggest you read it in part because you can then use it as a Rosetta Stone of sorts to compare your views with others who have also read it. That would be much more enjoyable than most of what people who have just met discuss at cocktail parties. As Professor Bloom points out, a common theme in literature is the inability of people to communicate to one another . . . because they do not listen. He has described my old friend, the communications stall. I have two primary regrets about this book (other than wishing he had included more of his favorite works). One, that Professor Bloom did not personalize it more. He might have explained how his life's decisions and actions were affected by literature in critical instances. Two, that Professor Bloom ignored other forms of writing such as essays and nonfiction books. I assume he reads both, and I wish to know what he likes and why. In other words, I would wish to know Professor Bloom better through his book. I was attracted to the parts of his personality I became acquainted with and would have liked to have continued the conversation in my mind. Enjoy this book, be enhanced by remembering the works he describes that you like, and delight in, the works that you will read because you learned more about them here! Donald Mitchell (donmitch@irresistibleforces.com)
Rating:
Summary: Fascinating insights
Review: I first heard of this book on NPR and bought it to build up some ammunition to get my hubby, who rarely reads, to read books I love. My perespective changed within reading 5 pages of the book. This book is for soi distant bibliophiles. It shows us why we read - primarily in search of a mind "more original than our own", what to read, what to expect from good critics and why it is essential to ignore all the cant on old classics floating around and surrender ourselves to the writer. It also shows us the folly of trying to change the world by reading. I do agree a more indepth analysis of the pieces selected would be more interesting and worthwhile of the time and effort one would put into reading the book. But, brief as it was his analysis of chekov helped me understand his genre of short stories better. The book may not be sufficient to convert non-readers, but, it vindicates the stand of voracious readers. I was utterly disappointed PGWodehouse and Bernard shaw were not picked ;(
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