give some direction to the taste

Tom Lutz checks out the "new throng of authors" who want to save us from English departments and our reading selves.

What the writers always insisted was that people are better off reading Tolstoy than some yahoo from the University of Akron deconstructing Tolstoy, and who would disagree with that? Whoever it is, they seem to need a lot of convincing, because scads of authors have published books advising them to beware the snobs and schoolmarms in academia and look at "the text itself." The "how-to-read" genre is venerable, already well under way when Noah Porter published "Books and Reading, or What Books Shall I Read and How Should I Read Them?" in 1871. There is something odd, though, about the latest slough of anti-academic books offering to teach us "how to read." Perhaps it is the fact that they are written by academics like professor Prose of Bard College. But perhaps it is because most of these books are only masquerading as guides to reading. What each really offers is a series of explications of famous passages, much like, well, academic criticism.