You mentioned Adler's How to Read a Book, and it really is the definitive work on the subject. But note that it aims to illuminate how to read philosophy and other expository works more so than fiction or poetry. The chapters on the latter two are nevertheless insightful, but you might want to pick up some other books on literature if your bookclub is going to have more Proust and Fitzgerald than Montaigne and Kant. On that end I'd recommend Poetry and Politics, also by Adler. The book is much more academic, and it provides a thorough history of how societies viewed literature from antiquity to the present based on comprehensive readings of major figure like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and less well-known figures like Sir Philip Sidney.
Bloom's How to Read and Why is a delight. I don't think it really answers either of those questions because as with everything Bloom has published in the last fifteen years, it's really just an elaboration of The Western Canon. But he's always fun to read. Like Adler, he's an academic figure who chose to write for a popular audience, and hence his (recent) work would better be called literary history than literary criticism.
Along these lines, Anthony Burgess wrote the Encyclopedia Britannica entry for "The Novel," and it's terrific. Like Bloom, it provides an excellent overview of literary history in a highly personal and even idiosyncratic prose. It's a very charming read. His comments on Henry James are hilarious. I'm not sure if it's available online, however, as I've been told there are discrepancies between the print Britannica and the online version.
Nabokov's three volumes of published lectures on literature are also a blast, although he's very much a provocateur, and I disagree with him often, escpecially about Don Quixote, of which his diatribe against garners an entire volume of its own. He says in his introduction to Lectures on Literature that a good reader only needs four things: "imagination," "memory," "a dictionary," and "some artistic sense." This should give you an idea of how Nabokov believes literature should be read. He wants to divorce literature from political context, and teach one to read entirely for pleasure. It's a refreshing approach, and one I find that inspires me to treasure books I would normally find a challenge to read.
There are countless books on how to read poetry. The popular volume a generation or two ago was John Ciardi's How Does a Poem Mean, and I think it still holds up. More accessible today I think is Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. Robert Pinsky also published a book devoted entirely to reading poetry out loud called Essential Pleasures. I haven't read it, but it certainly looks appealing, and it features a CD of his recitations of Milton, Keats, etc.
I'd also recommend dropping the cash on The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is just now out in its second edition. The book provides very insightful introductions to and excerpts of everyone from Aristotle and Longinus to Edward Said and Terry Eagleton. A terrific introduction not just to literary criticism, but to aesthetics across all the humanities.
. It's pretty dry, but I'm still proud of him.
