What inspired you to write How To Read and Why?
With both The Western Canon published back in 1994 and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human published in 1998, I had toured extensively and found an astonishing response from the audiences I addressed and from people who talked to me and people for whom I was signing books. To this day, I am deluged with mail from people who say how desperately pleased they are to find that someone is indeed writing about literature for the common reader, that someone does not try, as it were, to do the French thing, in regard to literary study or the many ideological modes which I will not mention, which are now practiced in the Anglo-American Universities and college world.
The more I thought about the response to these two books I had written, the more I realized that neither of them had really addressed a need which I felt highly qualified and highly driven to meet. And that is, a self-help book, indeed, an inspiration book, which would not only encourage solitary readers of all kinds all over the world to go on reading for themselves, but also support them in their voyages of self-discovery through reading. [How To Read and Why is meant to] give readers a human aid to their own reading, not to tell them what to read, because to some extent I had done that in The Western Canon, but to tell them indeed how to read, and even more than how, to remind them why we have to go on reading, why indeed it's a kind of death in life if we yield completely to what William Wordsworth called the "tyranny of the bodily eye," that is to say, the tyranny of the visual at a time when we are so bombarded by information of a visual kind.


What do you think is the single greatest threat to the future of reading?
I used to believe, until fairly recently, that the greatest threat was both visual over-stimulation--television, films, computers, virtual reality, and so on--and also auditory over-stimulation, you know, what I call rock religion, MTV, rap, all of these mindless burstings of the eardrums. And, of course, I think what has happened to education on every level, from grade school through graduate school throughout the English speaking world, is an increasing menace to disinterested and passionate reading, reading not governed by ideological and other social considerations.
But more recently, I have reached the very sad conclusion that what most threatens the future of reading is the, I will not say probability--I would become very wretched indeed--but the real possibility of the disappearance of the book. I begin to fear that what it means to be alone with a book--the various ways in which you can hold a book in your own hands and turn the pages and write in the margins when you are moved to do so, underline or emphasize when you are moved to do so--might almost vanish, that the technological overkill of the latest developments we are moving towards, the e-book sort of thing which Mr. Gates and others are proclaiming might perhaps put the book in jeopardy. And I really don't think that without the book we are going to survive. You can have a technological elite without the book, but you cannot finally have a humanely educated portion of the public that is able to teach to others. As a matter of fact, I think what you will really have is the death of humane teaching, as such.


What can people get from reading that they can't from movies or television?
I would say not less than everything. You can get a great deal of information, as such, from screens of one sort or another. You can dazzle yourself with images, if that is your desire. But how you are to grow in self-knowledge, become more introspective, discover the authentic treasures of insight and of compassion and of spiritual discernment and of a deep bond to other solitary individuals, how in fact can like call out to like without reading, I do not know. I suppose if I were to put it in almost a common denominator sort of way, I would say that you cannot even begin to heal the worst aspects of solitude, which are loneliness and potential madness, by visual experience of any kind, particularly the sort of mediated visual experience that you get off a screen of whatever sort. If you are to really encounter a human otherness which finds an answering chorus in yourself, which can become an answering chorus to your own sense of inward isolation, there truly is no authentic place to turn except to a book.


You talk in the book about contemporary readers having difficulty comprehending irony in literature of earlier times. Why do you think this is a problem?
Irony by definition is the saying of one thing while meaning another, sometimes indeed quite the opposite of what overtly you are saying. It's very difficult to have the highest kind of imaginative literature from Homer through Don DeLillo, as it were, and entirely avoid irony. There is the tragic irony, which one confronts everywhere in Shakespeare, that the audience, the auditor, and the reader are aware of--something in the character or predicament or inward affects, emotions of the protagonist or protagonists, that the heroes and heroines are totally unaware of themselves.
It's very difficult to convey this quality of irony by purely visual means. Visual ironies tend to fall flat or they vulgarize very quickly or they become grotesque. Really subtle irony of any sort demands literary language. The way in which meaning tends to wander in any really interesting literary text, so that the reader is challenged to go into exile with it, catch up with it, learn how to construe it, make it her very own, is essentially a function of irony. If we totally lose our ability to recognize and to understand irony, then we will be doomed to a kind of univocal discourse, which is alright I suppose for politicians' speeches and perhaps for certain representatives of popular religion, but will leave us badly defrauded.

What is your favorite book to teach?
Oh, most certainly, Shakespeare. Teaching either the high tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, or the greatest of the comedies, Twelfth Night, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, or what may be, I think, the finest, most representative instance of what Shakespeare can do, the two parts of King Henry IV, taken together, considered as one play, in which, of course, the central figure is my particular literary hero, Sir John Falstaff. And the so-called late romances, which are really tragi-comedies, particularly The Tempest and The Winter's Tale.

In the prologue you write, "Ultimately we read in order to strengthen the self." As you have noticed, self-help books top bestseller lists. How can reading great literature provide an alternative to these manuals?
In the self-help and inspirational category, to be perfectly fair, most things that are published, or that sell widely, are really intellectually and spiritually rather thin. They don't challenge a reader in any way, and I'm afraid frequently tend to flatter a reader in preconceptions and misconceptions and easy adjustments to one's own self. So the question is, how can one possibly hope to vie with, to compete with, self-help books of that sort in presenting a book on how to read and why. I suppose pragmatically is the only answer I can give. I have tried to be as simple and clear as I either can be or can be induced to be. It is a very direct book, I think. It addresses the reader--whether he or she be young or old, whatever their background--quite intimately.
The purpose of the book, and I hope the achievement of the book, is to get in very close to a reader and try to speak directly to what it is that they either might want out of the book or might be persuaded to see: that truly, though they may not have been aware of it, this is what they want and only really first-rate imaginative literature can bring it to them. For example, they want Chekhov's short stories, because they are not only so poignant but have the uncanny faculty, rather like Shakespeare in that regard, to persuade the reader or the auditor that certain truths about himself or herself, which are totally authentic, totally real, are being demonstrated to the reader for the very first time. It's not as though Shakespeare or Chekhov has created those truths. It's just that without the assistance of Shakespeare and Chekhov, we might never be able to see what is really there.