31 Books on Reading

Excerpts from 31 books that deal with reading.

De Poetica, Aristotle, 335 BC
On the Sublime, Longinus, c. 100 AD
“Of Books,” Montaigne, 1580
“Of Studies,” Francis Bacon, 1601
“The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1837
“Reading,” Henry David Thoreau, 1854
“Literary Pleasure,” Jorge Borges, 1922-1928
“How To Read,” Ezra Pound, 1929
How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler, 1940
“Good Readers and Good Writers,” Vladimir Nabokov, 1948
The Anatomy of Bibliomania, Holbrook Jackson, 1950
The Great Conversation, Robert M. Hutchins, 1952
The Reading Life (compilation), C. S. Lewis, 1961, 1962
The Books in My Life, Henry Miller, 1969
How to Read Slowly, James W. Sire, 1978
Why Read the Classics?, Italo Calvino, 1991
Realms of Gold, Leland Ryken, 1991
The Western Canon, Harold Bloom, 1994
Great Books, David Denby, 1996
A History of Reading, Alberto Manguel, 1996
The New Lifetime Reading Plan, Clifton Fadiman, 1998
How to Read and Why, Harold Bloom, 2000
The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer, 2003
Why Read?, Mark Edmundson, 2004
Book by Book, Michael Dirda, 2005
Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading, Maureen Corrigan, 2005
Reading Like a Writer, Francine Prose, 2006
A Reader on Reading, Alberto Manguel, 2010
How to Read Literature, Terry Eagleton, 2013
The Art of X-Ray Reading, Roy Peter Clark, 2016
On Reading Well, Karen Swallow Prior, 2018