How to Read and Why

    The book ‘How to Read and Why’ was published by Touchstone in 2000 by Harold Bloom, an excellent literary critic, who wrote this book to give many examples from imaginative literature, or fictional writing, to show you why reading matters. He begins his book by giving us some guidelines to read well:

1.       Clear you mind of jargon.
2.       Read to improve your own interests, not those of your neighbor.
3.       A scholar is a candle, which the love and desire of all men will light.
4.       One must be an inventor to read well.
5.       Look for irony as you read.

    These principles of reading serve us as a reminder that we read for ourselves, while writers write for others. However, the opposite happens also, but the propose of reading fiction is to become better at overhearing ourselves as we seek what the author, Bloom, calls the Sublime, which is a hard pleasure to capture. Thus, we read fiction to enjoy our own interests, but you have to read a lot if you are going to become an interesting person.