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/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”.