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THE humanities are not just for the professoriate: This is the perspective of two impressive new books by prominent intellectuals.

Literary critic Harold Bloom’s 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human helped create something of a Shakespeare moment in the mass culture. His new book, How to Read and Why (Scribner, 283 pp., $25), builds on that surprising popular success by trying to explain, to a broad audience, what literature is trying to do. While Bloom often returns to Shakespeare, his subject here is the entire spectrum of Western imaginative literature.

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THE humanities are not just for the professoriate: This is the perspective of two impressive new books by prominent intellectuals.

Literary critic Harold Bloom’s 1998 book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human helped create something of a Shakespeare moment in the mass culture. His new book, How to Read and Why (Scribner, 283 pp., $25), builds on that surprising popular success by trying to explain, to a broad audience, what literature is trying to do. While Bloom often returns to Shakespeare, his subject here is the entire spectrum of Western imaginative literature.