How to Read and Why was published by Scribner in 2000 and represents Bloom’s most accessible work — a guide to reading addressed not to academics but to general readers who love literature and want to understand it better. The book is organized by genre: short stories (Chekhov, Turgenev, Borges, Hemingway), poems (Housman, Blake, Whitman, Dickinson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets), novels (Austen, Dickens, Stendhal, Cervantes, Proust), and plays (Shakespeare, Ibsen, Wilde, Chekhov).
Each section combines close readings of specific works with broader reflections on what the genre demands of readers — what skills and habits of attention make the difference between passive consumption and genuine engagement. Bloom’s practical advice is simple and forceful: read slowly, reread often, read against the grain of your own assumptions, and above all read for yourself rather than for any institutional or ideological purpose.
The polemic is characteristic Bloom: reading is a solitary and self-interested activity, he argues, and attempts to make it serve social or political ends inevitably diminish it. We read to strengthen the self, to encounter minds greater than our own, and to discover possibilities of thought and feeling that we could not have generated on our own. The book is a manifesto for aesthetic reading in an age that increasingly demands that art justify itself through social utility.
Collecting How to Read and Why
First edition (Scribner, New York, 2000): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- Signed copies: $40–$100