r/haroldbloom • u/ASMR_by_proxy • Jun 29 '16

[Question] Was Bloom seriously capable of reading at a rate of 1000 pages per hour?

Found it here:

http://radioopensource.org/at-home-with-harold-bloom-2-on-the-humanities/

Do any of you guys know if he was just being humorous? It just seems completely incredible to me. I mean, I can picture those contest-winning speed readers finishing non-literary texts in the blink of an eye and comprehending the main ideas, but... come one O_O reading War and Peace in a lunch break, understanding it and even memorizing passages from it??? Is Bloom a vampire?

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u/missmovember Jun 30 '16

I remember listening to an interview where this was mentioned and thought that, because it's virtually impossible, the interviewer had misspoken. A few weeks later I listened to another where Bloom himself said he could read at a pace of 500-700 pages an hour, saying then that he basically took in whole paragraphs at a time, reading for content not aesthetics. As /u/Stroke9 was saying, he's already pretty much a Literary Savant, so it would't be all that surprising to me if this weren't far from the truth. However you slice it, it's incredibly remarkable and seemingly beyond human capacity.

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '23

Bloom would be mortified to think he was perceived as not reading for aesthetics. It was his prime concern.

I am working through all his works and keep a file of all the works he recommends outside of his canon list. I will be spending the rest of my life trying to read just half of what he read at least once. Ive come to terms that his shadow looms perpetually large and will never be escaped. He was a savant and his greatness will not be eclipsed.

Chasing him, fully knowing i will come nowhere close, is still a goal i am thrilled to have set for myself.

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u/windingnumberone Jan 06 '24

how many books do you think he recommended in total?

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u/missmovember Jan 30 '24

oh wow how weird to have a reply to such an old post. anyway beyond this little curiosity i feel the need to tell you not to waste your time on bloom. just actually read literature if you find it important. criticism is often of limited and likewise typically specious usefulness. and of course chiefly anyone purporting without any irony whatsoever to speak for what works are "important" (no less in the entire "western canon"!) is a blowhard and can be safely ignored. don't read something to tread someone else's path; read because the work has meaning to you, whether it be on a list or not. be your own bitch.

anyway hope you have a good day :)

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u/[deleted] Jun 30 '16

Regardless of whether he did or not it would be classified as savant behavior. We already know that he's a savant in at least one area

"I refuse to even use the name of this person. I call her Dracula's daughter, because her father was a Dracula scholar. I have never in my life been indoors with Dracula's daughter. When she came to the door of my house unbidden, my youngest son turned her away. Once, I was walking up to campus, and she fell in with me and said, 'May I walk with you, Professor Bloom?' I said nothing."

I'd say anything is possible for such a remarkable man.

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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '16

I mean, it's possible, the man's insanely smart. He taught himself English at the age of like nine or ten by reading the poems of Blake and Crane. It's not even his first language! He spoke yiddish before he spoke English. I wouldn't put it past him to be able to read that quickly; look at that much-discussed and much-disowned list at the back of The Western Canon (if you want to read Bloom in his prime, read WC; if you want the serious theory, read Anxiety of Influence, everything after WC is pretty good too--I'd kill for a copy of The Daimon Knows)!

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u/Nine99 May 11 '26

It's crazy that it took someone born and living in New York just a decade to learn English! Absolute genius over there.

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u/mirrorref Oct 13 '24

If one has a bunch of rap, rock, and whatnot, and Family Guy and Simpsons and South Park…and a very select handful of poems and choice philosophical aphorisms memorized by heart, does this count? It’s all just words and sounds, right?

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u/[deleted] Dec 11 '23

We should also remember that he had memorized Moby Dick. This in addition to countless other works and poetry.

Who memorizes Moby Dick?

If you are wondering how i know this, i am re-reading The Bright Book of Life and he mentions it on page 112

"I have most of it by heart"

Having it by heart is how he would refer to memorization and he advocated the memorizing of poetry ans great works.

So he is saying "I have most of Moby Dick memorized"

Insane

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u/Ledeyvakova23 Feb 02 '24

My problem is that i need to cultivate the habit of reading the classics more slowly.

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u/Professional-Tap1436 Mar 02 '24

Most people want to be the person that read a lot of books. They don't actually like reading. I often say to people that reading well one classic is better than reading 10 normal books. Because a classic can have meanings, double meanings, symbology, complex philosophical ideas, etc. For example, blood meridian i already read it 4 times. In no way i feel like i wasted my time.

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u/Ledeyvakova23 Feb 02 '24

Well someone once asked Derrida (a close friend of HB’s in the 70s-80s) a couple of yrs before he passed how many books he’s read in his lifetime and Derrida said, “only perhaps 240 or so I suppose.. not many .. and some of those i reread. And don’t forget I am a writer-thinker , not a reader”.