Rebecca Reads

HTR&W

How to Read and Why (Reading List)

By Harold Bloom

The selections should not be interpreted as an exhaustive list of what to read, but rather as a sampling of works that illustrate why to read. (Preface to How to Read and Why, page 19)

Visit my Amazon store to purchase any of these works.

I. Short Stories

• Ivan Turgenev:
  • “Bezhin Lea”
  • “Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands”

• Anton Chekhov
  • “The Kiss”
  • “The Student”
  • “The Lady with the Dog”

• Guy de Maupassant
  • “Madame Tellier’s Establishment”
  • “The Horla”

• Ernest Hemingway
  • “Hills Like White Elephants”
  • “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen”
  • “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
  • “A Sea Change”

• Flannery O’Connor
  • “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”
  • “Good Country People”
  • “A View of the Woods”

• Vladimir Nabokov
  • “The Vane Sisters”

• Jorge Luis Borges
  • “Tlön, Ugbar, Orbis Tertius”

• Tommaso Landolfi
  • “Gogol’s Wife”

• Italo Calvino
  • Invisible Cities

II. Poems

• A. E. Housman
  • “Into My Heart an Air That Kills”

• William Blake
  • “The Sick Rose”

• Walter Savage Landor
  • “On His Seventy-fifth Birthday”

• Alfred Lord Tennyson
  • “The Eagle”
  • “Ulysses”

• Robert Browning
  • “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

• Walt Whitman
  • Song of Myself

• Emily Dickinson
  • Poem 1260, “Because That You Are Going”

• Emily Brontë
  • “Stanzas: Often Rebuked, Yet Always Back Returning”

• Popular Ballads
  • “Sir Patrick Spence”
  • “The Unquiet Grave”

• Anonymous
  • “Tom O’Bedlam”

• William Shakespeare
  • Sonnet 121, “‘Tis Better to Be Vile Than Vile Esteemed”
  • Sonnet 129, “Th’ Expense of Spirit in a Waste of Shame”
  • Sonnet 144, “Two Loves I Have, of Comfort and Despair”

• John Milton
  • Paradise Lost

• William Wordsworth
  • “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal”
  • “My Heart Leaps Up When I Behold”

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• Percy Bysshe Shelley
  • The Triumph of Life

• John Keats
  • “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”

III. Novels, Part I

• Miguel de Cervantes: Don Quixote
• Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma
• Jane Austen: Emma
• Charles Dickens: Great Expectations
• Fyodor Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment
• Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
• Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
• Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain

IV. Plays

• William Shakespeare: Hamlet
• Henrik Ibsen: Hedda Gabler
• Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest

V. Novels, Part II

• Herman Melville: Moby-Dick
• William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
• Nathanael West: Miss Lonelyhearts
• Thomas Pynchon: The Crying of Lot
• Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian
• Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man
• Toni Morrison: Song of Solomon

I’m reading these as a personal challenge. Do you want to join me?