How to read and why

Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom. Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. Always dazzling in his ability to draw connections between texts across continents and centuries, Bloom instructs readers in how to immerse themselves in the different literary forms. Bloom not only provides illuminating guidance on how to read a text but also illustrates what such reading can bring -- aesthetic pleasure, increased individuality and self-knowledge, and the lifetime companionship of the most engaging and complex literary characters.--From publisher's description.

Authors' names only: Short stories (Ivan Turgenev ; Anton Chekhov ; Guy de Maupassant ; Ernest Hemingway ; Flannery O'Connor ; Vladimir Nabokov ; Jorge Luis Borges ; Tommaso Landolfi ; Italo Calvino) -- Poems (A.E. Housman ; William Blake ; Walter Savage Landor ; Alfred Lord Tennyson ; Robert Browning ; Walt Whitman ; Emily Dickinson ; Emily Bronte ; William Shakespeare ; John Milton ;William Wordsworth ; Samuel Taylor Coleridge ; Percy Bysshe Shelley ; John Keats) -- Novels, Part I (Miguel de Cervantes ; Stendhal ; Jane Austen ; Charles Dickens ; Fyodor Dostoevsky ; Henry James ; Marcel Proust ; Thomas Mann).

Cont.: Plays (William Shakespeare ; Henrik Ibsen ; Oscar Wilde) -- Novels, Part II (Herman Melville ; William Faulkner ; Nathanael West ; Thomas Pynchon ; Cormac McCarthy ; Ralph Ellison ; Toni Morrison).