Setting aside his familiar combativeness, Bloom addresses the solitary reader and invites them to engage in the process of reading with a very clear motivation: to discover and enrich themselves. Drawing from his vast experience, Bloom turns to the great works of literature for their unshakeable values. His belief in the healing power of literature resonates on every page of this enjoyable and profoundly important book.

"Information is constantly offered to us - but where will we find knowledge?" This is the poignant question with which the esteemed critic Harold Bloom begins his book on the terms, benefits, and joys of proper reading. Bloom - who, with his inexhaustible passion for literature for over forty years, transforms his students into avid readers - expresses his concerns about the dangerous addictions created by the prevalence of digital information, while simultaneously declaring the commitments of his own approach, which is nothing less than the cultivation of critical knowledge.

His counterargument against ready-made interpretive proposals that drain literature of its vital forces and embalm it in one-dimensional ideological frameworks feeds the undercurrent of this book, but it is not its primary aim. Bloom passionately believes in the value of literature and its educational role in troubled times.

The aim of this book is to re-read the classic texts, both old and new, claiming our own inquiries into them and the autonomy of our own judgment. A gallery of authors and literary figures wanders through the pages of the book: from Milton and Shakespeare to Proust and Toni Morrison, from Don Quixote and Tennyson's Ulysses to Melville's Captain Ahab and Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas.

In these daring tales of opposition and nostalgia, despair and transcendence that Bloom narrates, in these magnificent quests unfolding on the pages of this book, perhaps the greatest critic of our times invites the solitary reader to seek a more challenging pleasure, abandoning the fashionable lenses. If such a meaningful encounter of writing and reading comes to fruition, Bloom believes that great literature has much to offer the reader: it will shine a light on forgotten and unknown pieces of themselves and help them weigh the world with a new, clear eye.

[Excerpt from the text on the back cover of the edition]