How to Read and Why

"Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" Harold Bloom puts the question on his first page, and everything after it is an answer given the way the best teachers give one, by opening a book and reading aloud. He walks through stories, poems, novels and plays like a man showing a friend the rooms of a house he has lived in all his life: here is Chekhov's gentleness, here the labyrinths of Borges, here Hamlet thinking himself past every limit a mind can reach, here Don Quixote riding out with Sancho beside him.