How to Read and Why

I heard Bloom interviewed by Charlie Rose on youtube and he made it sound as if this book might be more accessible than The Anxiety of Influence, which I found interesting but difficult. I thought the difficulty was my fault, though I also thought his arguments were more like assertions than syllogisms. Coming from a family obsessed with the arts and who agonized, not only over influence, but everything else as well, I decided not to let my family influence me so much and to agonize less. If Harold (same name as my father) could talk to good old Charlie (they seemed to have a relationship outside the 4th wall of the interview frame) maybe he could talk to me. (I always felt excluded when my father and older brother, not named Charlie, conversed about literature.)

I'd never wondered why to read beyond the ultimate questions of why be alive and what are other people for anyway. As to how, though years of schooling tried to tell me I was doing it wrong, I decided that the years of schooling were the wrongness and I'd read any way I liked, thank you. Over the intervening years I further decided that people tended to talk at each other more than to each other and one reason to read is that authors often tried to talk to you, even if it was merely to increase their sales. Harold (I'll continue to call him that in the interest of humanizing him) likened reading to relationships with people worth having relationships with, whom we might otherwise never get to know. I like this idea but wonder a bit about the those people not worth having relationships with and whether Shakespeare didn't in fact include some of those people in his plays as well as have them attend performances (the groundlings, perhaps?).

The problem is, Harold didn't speak to me in this book. He seemed to be speaking to people who were very much the same as he was--younger or less well read versions of himself who needed a little push (or would appreciate one) along the road to becoming more Harold. I wanted to be one of those people because Harold made it sound like they were who one should be, and who wants to be who one shouldn't be?

Well, it turns out I want to. Though he did convince me I should probably read more Shakespeare, he also convinced me I should read less Harold.