I had to read this for my Senior Seminar over a period of 4 weeks...I really wish an entire 8 or 16 week period could be spent on this book alone. You really need time to explore everything that Edmundson is saying. So this will go on my bookshelf and when I'm completely done with school I'm going to teach myself a class based on this book. Way to many ideas to be explored. ( )

Why Read? is a compilation of the clever thoughts of others. Edmundson is constantly direct quoting, recalling or paraphrasing the intelligent works of Arthur Schoppenhauer, David Denby, David Rieff, de Man, Friedrich Schiller, Foucault, Frye, Henry James, Harold Bloom, Heidegger, James Edwards, Kierkegaard, Karen Armstrong, Jacques Derrida, Lionel Trilling, Marcel Proust, Matthew Arnold, Martha Nussbaum, Milan Kundera, Oscar Wilde, the Marquis de Sade, Paul Cantor, Paul Ricoeur, Sir Philip Sidney, Richard Rorty, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Frost, Simon Frith, Stanley Fish, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Walter Jackson Bate, William B. Yeats, Wordsworth (among others), without a single footnote or bibliography, works cited page, or what have you. Sections on the connections to God, questioning God, and delving into the importance of critical thinking had me yawning. Is it deliberate that Edmundson's examples of his students are mostly female? Just curious.
My favorite sections are when Edmundson was drawing connections to humanism - finding the deep parallels between individual reality and literary imagination. Can we identify with Hamlet's situation? How does this relate to the here and now? ( )

The importance of reading has never had a better spokesperson than Mark Edmundson. In this compact volume he extols, implore, educates, and persuades the reader of the value of reading great books. Reading for comprehension and understanding is a habit that improves one's life in myriad ways; thus the importance of reading cannot be overstated. This profound testament is a book to be savored, enjoyed, and made a part of every serious reader's literary life. ( )

A few months ago, I read Edmundson's later book, Self and Soul: A Defense of Idealsand was intellectually excited by its ideas, its cogent arguments, and its overall argument. Books that stretch the mind as this one had, make me think and consider things not previously thought of, or immerse me in new or fresh ideas, are treasures that are hard to find and are like gold when I do find them Self and Soul was just such a book.
So my hopes and expectations were high when I turned to Edmundson's earlier book, Why Read?. And the book certainly lived up to those expectations.
At first, the question, "Why read?" would seem easily answered and indeed the easy, facile answers are good ones. But Edmundson makes a case that reading is more than just casual entertainment and an enjoyable pastime. When the material is right, when the author tries to challenge his readers rather than just entertaining them, reading can take the reader to new vistas, help him examine his own beliefs and values, move him toward his better aspirations, and inform him pointedly about his fellow human beings. Edmundson presents a case for reading the world's finest literature, its best poetry, its most thoughtful non-fiction.
The book seems to be an argument aimed at college instructors to challenge their students with only the best in literature, both because it accomplishes all of the goals just mentioned and also because it trains students to recognize the good materials, the deepest thoughts,the best of man's ideals, and separate those from the bad.
It is a sad fact that study after study reveals that a little over 40% of Americans will not read a book in any given year and that around 28% will never in their lifetimes read a book at all. No wonder Americans are seen around the world as being uninformed, stupid even. No wonder Americans elect the people they do, believe the myths they do, and are so uncritical in making decisions.
Edmundson argues that university professors ought to be placing great books before students and challenging them to personalize the book, to consider how it fits into their own life or values system, and to see the book as a tool for learning about the nature and complexity of human beings. But his argument is not just aimed at his university colleagues, it is aimed at all readers, challenging us all by subtlety asking, "With so much wonderful and enlightening literature available, why not use it to elevate your life?"
When Huckleberry Finn decides, "All right, I'll just go to hell;" when Raskolnikov ( Crime and Punishment) faces the fact that he cannot escape his conscience even when he can escape the law; or when the growers in California display their callousness by destroying their "surplus crops" in front of starving refugees in the Grapes of Wrath, don't we learn something, feel something and personalize something much greater than what we will find in the latest murder mystery?
Edmundson argues that we do grow from such readings, and that is the answer to "Why Read?" ( )

A splendid argument for the vital organ of the western canon; a worthy formulation of Rorty's concept of the Final Vocabulary. ( )