How to read and why

In the vastly influential "The Western Canon", Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand a greater depth of the individual self. "How to Read and Why" continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain deeper self-awareness.

Poems, stories, novels, plays and parables are all analyzed as forms of writing as immersion, the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeare's sonnets, the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes, the novels of Proust and Calvino, Sophocles's "Oedipus Rex" and Mark's Gospel.

Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of why we read: increased individuality, respite from visual bombardment, a return to "deep feeling" and "deep thinking".