If Harold Bloom’s new book “How to Read and Why” seems smug and condescending, that’s because it is. The book claims to be a practical guide to show us how to read great literature and provide the reason why. “But Professor Bloom’s own rhetoric is so poisonously alienating to the general reader – with its mandarin locutions and tireless self-congratulation – that he ends up sounding like a parody of the jargon-spouting Neo-post-whatever-ists he keeps complaining about.” – New York Magazine