How to Read and Why by Harold Bloom Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $1.91 You Save: $13.09 (87%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of How to Read and Why
Book Review: So-So
Summary: 2 Stars
Literary critic should have titled this little guide `What to Read and Why,' seeing as he devotes only a few paragraphs to why reading might be valuable. That said, Bloom is a terrifyingly accomplished reader, but he isn't much of a thinker or a critic in the way Benjamin or Derrida were. Bloom's incessant propensity to judge all literature from the `how is this compared to Shakespeare' lens is foolish and lacking in any insight. At times his criticism seems almost amateurish and rushed. He doesn't seem to be a very good reader of Hemingway, for instance. At the outset of a review of `Hills Like White Elephants,' Bloom writes that "Hemingway's personal mystique-his bravura poses as warrior, big-game hunter, bullfighter, and boxer-is irrelevant to `Hills Like White Elephants' as its male protagonist's insistence that `You know that I love you'" (47). Yet later in Bloom's review, he writes [on `The Snows of Kilimanjaro']: The irony is at Hemingway's expense, insofar as Harry prophesies the Hemingway who, nineteen days shor of his sixty-second birthday, turned a double-barreled shotgun on himself" (49). Bloom seems to have reversed tactics here. Never the less, Bloom is an undeniably great reader of poetry; in this volume he tells you all about his personal favorites: Stevens, Whitman, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, etc. Kind of fun, but far from great criticism.Book Review: The "Why" is evident, but not the "How"
Summary: 3 Stars
Harold Bloom has specific tastes he makes known throughout this book. One example: "Yet Maupassant is the best of the really "popular" story-writers, vastly superior to O. Henry (who could be quite good) and greatly preferable to the abominable Poe."
This is book of literary criticism, of "why" one should read certain authors and not others. It would greatly benefit readers to read the stories/plays/novels Mr. Bloom examines, because key plot points and endings are discussed. A theme throughout this book is how literature can improve the character of a person who reads it and grasps its meaning. This would preclude reading purely for enjoyment, which, in my opinion, can be ascribed to time-honored literature as well as popular fiction, and should be the initial step toward encouraging a fondness for reading. While this book represents "why" (and "what") to read, if you're truly interested in "how" to read, I recommend Understanding Fiction by Brooks and Warren.
Book Review: Waste of time
Summary: 1 Stars
I expected something akin to Mortimer Adler's How to Read and Why. Instead I found myself dragged into a solipsistic rant of Mr. Bloom's favorite books. To be sure, some may enjoy his discussion of how Cervantes is instrumental to modern literature however this book did not meet my expectations. Instead I got the impression that this is more of a 'vanity' book than anything. Not only is the book mislabeled, it is an irritating read.Book Review: Why you can read Shakespeare and skip the rest
Summary: 2 Stars
This book is a prime example of the Emperor not having any clothes. If you read this book not knowing who the author was, you would throw it across the room in irritation: enough about Shakespeare, when are you going to talk about the novel (play, poem, etc) under discussion. When are you going to stop making emphatic superlative statements and then refuse to back them up with any evidence? When are you going to supply some evidence for any of your opinions and not expect the reader to take it on faith because so august a critic is saying it? (For this part, I guess you WOULD have to know the author).Probably the most annoying and egocentric book of lit crit I have ever read, saved somewhat by its brevity. Only the section on the Romantic poets was useful. As for the rest, might as well take Bloom's advice and read Shakespeare instead. Reading this book is a waste of time (and money).
Book Review: Wish I Hadn't Bought the Hardcover
Summary: 3 Stars
This is the last time I buy one of Bloom's new books in hardcover. The slim volume is attractively packaged but it wasn't worth the price. In interviews Bloom has claimed that he intended the book to introduce great literature to a general audience. That's a laudable intention, but one Bloom is ill-suited to fulfill. The tone of the book, like the selections in it, is an awkward mixture of the dumbed-down and the pedantic. Bloom is trying to express his feelings for literature and his ideas about it simply and straightforwardly. The problem is, he doesn't actually have any insight into life to impart, so his "simple" statements are no better than platitudes. One can't fault a literary critic for not being a fountain of wisdom; it's surely enough to ask that they have insights into literature, and Bloom often does. But even his readings of literature here are marred by platitudes.Bloom, at least in his later years, succeeds best as a Wildean critic, making grand, fantastic, tongue-in-cheek overstatements, as in "Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human." Here, where he tries to be more intimate, he loses his glamour. It's pretty disappointing to encounters truisms like we read for self-knowledge and self-improvement after being obscurely excited by all that talk about the "cosmological abyss" of Hamlet's selfhood.
My advice is that instead of reading this book, the ambitious beginning reader of literature should go to the library and read, one by one, the introductory essays Bloom wrote on every important writer and work under the sun for the Modern Critical Series, where you'll find many of the same arguments with a somewhat fuller development. That's what I did as a teenager, and although I found him impenetrable at first, as I continued reading the essays while also reading more and more literature, gradually Bloom began to make sense, and to be a great companion in my exploration of literature--infuriating but addictive.