I remember being thrilled by both The Elder Edda and The Younger Edda when I was a child I was enthralled by mythology. “There is also a wonderful series of fairy tale books by the Victorian re-teller Andrew Lang, called The Green Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, and so on. They are both extraordinary-and scary-in the extreme. Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales and the Tales of the Brothers Grimm certainly qualify. “Then there are the traditional tales. “Edward Lear would have to be in the canon-all the Nonsense Books.

And Through the Looking Glass more than his other works. Lewis Carroll, I would think, more than any other author in English. “All of Lewis Carroll’s works would have to be canonized. I don’t think that anyone who read The Wind in the Willows when he was a child would ever forget it. Toad of Toad Hall,’ at which I broke into sympathetic laughter.

It’s one of those old, Edith Wharton kinds of buildings with extremely high ceilings. A few nights ago he spoke to me on the phone and he said that he felt very lonesome there. “My son, who’s 32, is often in our New York apartment these days without either my wife or myself. I still remember my older sister reading me The Wind in the Willows, which broke my heart many times and certainly alerted me to literary values. HomeArts: “What books would you include in a Western Canon for Children?”īloom: “I will recommend again Kenneth Grahame’s surpassingly marvelous book The Wind in the Willows for everybody between the ages of zero and 100. Housman, or being alone with Norse mythology or The Wind in the Willows.” They will individuate themselves by being alone with a book, by being alone with the poetry of William Blake or A.

“So if children are to individuate themselves, they will not do it by watching television, or by playing video games, or by listening to rock, or by watching rock videos. And it is by becoming more interesting-and this sounds callous, but it’s true, I think-that by becoming more interesting both to oneself and to others, one develops a sense of one’s separate and distinct self. Harold Bloom: “To be coldly pragmatic about it, reading good books will make them more interesting both to themselves and to others. HomeArts: “Why should children read? And why should children read good books?” I archived the interview so that I might link to it for discussion purposes only. This interview originally appeared in HomeArts magazine, but their web site disappeared some years ago.

Bloom the western canon