Excerpt from How To Read And Why by Harold Bloom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Contents and Prologue

CONTENTS

Preface
Prologue: Why Read?

I. Short Stories
Introduction
Ivan Turgenev, "Bezhin Lea"
Anton Chekhov, "Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands"
Guy de Maupassant, "The Kiss", "The Student", "The Lady with the Dog" "Madame Tellier's Establishment"
"The Horla"
Ernest Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants" "God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen" "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" "A Sea Change"
Flannery O'Connor, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" "Good Country People" "A View of the Woods"
Vladimir Nabokov, "The Vane Sisters"
Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius"
Tommaso Landolfi, "Gogol's Wife"
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Summary Observations

II. Poems
Introduction
Housman, Blake, Landor, and Tennyson
A. E. Housman, "Into My Heart an Air That Kills"
William Blake, "The Sick Rose"
Walter Savage Landor, "On His Seventy-fifth Birthday"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Eagle", "Ulysses"
Robert Browning, "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"
Walt Whitman "Song of Myself"

Dickinson, Brontë, Popular Ballads, and "Tom O'Bedlam"
Emily Dickinson Poem 1260, "Because That You Are Going"
Emily Brontë, "Stanzas: Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning"
Popular Ballads, "Sir Patrick Spence" "The Unquiet Grave"
Anonymous, "Tom O'Bedlam"

William Shakespeare
Sonnet 121, "'Tis Better to Be Vile Than Vile Esteemed"
Sonnet 129, "Th' Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame"
Sonnet 144, "Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair"

Milton, Wordsworth and Coleridge
John Milton, "Paradise Lost"
William Wordsworth, "A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal" "My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

Shelley and Keats
Percy Bysshe Shelley, "The Triumph of Life"
John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
Summary Observations

III. Novels, Part I

Introduction
Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma
Jane Austen: Emma
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain
Summary Observations

IV. Plays

Introduction
William Shakespeare: Hamlet
Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest
Summary Observations

V. Novels, Part II

Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts
Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon
Summary Observations

Epilogue: Completing the Work

Prologue: Why Read?

It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves. How they read, well or badly, and what they read, cannot depend wholly upon themselves, but why they read must be for and in their own interest. You can read merely to pass the time, or you can read with an overt urgency, but eventually you will read against the clock. Bible readers, those who search the Bible for themselves, perhaps exemplify the urgency more plainly than readers of Shakespeare, yet the quest is the same. One of the uses of reading is to prepare ourselves for change, and the final change alas is universal.

Copyright © 2000 by Harold Bloom. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Simon & Schuster.