How to Read and Why

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He has written more than 20 books of literary criticism. From a lifetime of writing and teaching about literature, this great scholar exhorts readers to consider the pleasures and benefits of reading well. Beginning with a basic question, 'Why read?' Bloom offers his thoughts on works that form the canon of great literature. Short stories, poems, novels, and plays are held up to the light of Bloom's considerable intellect. Here are the authors that bear reading again and again, including Turgenev and Tennyson, Cervantes and Shakespeare. Harold Bloom's many honors include a MacArthur Prize, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy's Gold Medal for Criticism. As he shares his passion for literature, his discussion is made even more enthralling through John McDonough's warm narration.