In the vastly influential The Western Canon, Harold Bloom outlined what we should read to understand a greater depth of the individual self. How to Read and Why continues the argument and focusses on how we use literature in order to gain deeper self-awareness. Poems, stories, novels, plays and parables are all analyzed as forms of writing as immersion, the language of individuality and inwardness: Shakespeares sonnets, the short stories of Hemingway and de Cervantes, the novels of Proust and Calvino, Sophocless Oedipus Rex and Marks Gospel. Harold Bloom also addresses the idea of why we read: increased individuality, respite from visual bombardment, a return to deep feeling and deep thinking.