How To Read and Why by Harold Bloom (Fourth Estate, £7.99 in UK)

Harold Bloom might have instead called this most recent work "How to Breathe and Why". This perhaps most eminent of living literary critics is first and foremost a great lover, even worshipper of literature. Most of this book consists of Bloom's interpretations of the works of a spectrum of literary giants - Shakespeare, whom he claims "invented humanity", reigning supreme in a list including Milton, Cervantes, the Romantic poets, Ibsen, Wilde, Dickinson, Faulkner to name but a very few. But, although first-year university students may greedily scour these essays for quotable insights to deploy in seminars, the real thrust of the book lies in the short prologue, 'Why Read?'. Bloom first exhorts us to openness and to allow ourselves to be approached, "found" by the richness of meaning and experience in texts. To culminate his exposition on the five principles of reading, he assures us that "a higher pleasure remains the reader's quest. There is a reader's Sublime, and it seems the only secular transcendence we can ever attain . . . "