How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Paperback – August 15, 1972

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:1- "Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to. and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding."2- "Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one's senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities in the process of unaided discovery and to forget or minimize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening. For example, many people assume that though a poet must use his imagination in writing a poem they do not have to use their imagination in reading it. The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. The reason for this is that reading in this sense is discovery, too— although with help instead of without it."3- "The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading. Other names might be rudimentary reading, basic reading or initial reading; any one of these terms serves to suggest that as one masters this level one passes from nonliteracy to at least beginning literacy. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. We prefer the name elementary reading, however, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school...At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is "What does the sentence say?" That could be conceived as a complex and difficult question, of course. We mean it here, however, in its simplest sense."4- "The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading. It is characterized by its special emphasis on time When reading at this level, the student is allowed a set time to complete an assigned amount of reading. He might be allowed fifteen minutes to read this book, for instance or even a book twice as long...Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is "What does the sentence say?" the question typically asked at this level is "What is the book about?" That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are "What is the structure of the book or "What are its parts?""5- "The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading. It is both a more complex and a more systematic activity than either of the two levels of reading discussed so far. Depending on the difficulty of the text to be read, it makes more or less heavy demands on the reader. Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading. or good reading—the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time...On this level of reading, the reader grasps a book—the metaphor is apt—and works at it until the book becomes his own. Francis Bacon once remarked that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it."6- "The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading. It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader, even if the materials he is reading are themselves relatively easy and unsophisticated. Another name for this level might be comparative reading. When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve. But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the svntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of he hooks. It is obvious, therefore, that syntopical reading is the most active and effortful kind of reading."7- "Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. In any event, the speed at which they read, be it fast or slow, is but a fractional part of most people's problem with reading. Skimming or pre-reading a book is always a good idea; it is necessary when you do not know, as is often the case, whether the book you have in hand is worth reading carefully. You will find that out by skimming it. It is generally desirable to skim even a book that you intend to read carefully, to get some idea of its form and structure."8- "The first stage of inspectional reading-the stage we have called systematic skimming—serves to prepare the analytical reader to answer the questions that must be asked during the first stage of that level. Systematic skimming, in other words. anticipates the comprehension of a book's structure. And the second stage of inspectional reading—the stage we have called superficial reading—serves the reader when he comes to the second stage of reading at the analytical level. Superficial reading is the first necessary step in the interpretation of a book's contents."9- "The art of reading on any level above the elementary consists in the habit of asking the right questions in the right order. There are four main questions you must ask about any book. 1. What is the book about as a whole?...2. What is being said in detail, and how?...Is the book true, in whole or part? WHAT OF IT? If the book has given you information. you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested."10- "It is hard to learn to read well. Not only is reading, especially analytical reading, a very complex activity-much more complex than skiing; it is also much more of a mental activity. The beginning skier must think of physical acts that he can later forget and perform almost automatically. It is relatively easy to think of and be conscious of physical acts. It is much harder to think of mental acts, as the beginning analytical reader must do; in a sense, he is thinking about his own thoughts. Most of us are unaccustomed to doing this. Nevertheless, it can be done, and a person who does it cannot help learning to read much better."11- "Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is, therefore, the most critical. He is the reader who finally responds to a book by the greatest effort to make up his own mind on the matters the author has discussed."12- "The First Stage of Analytical Reading: Rules for Finding What a Book Is About 1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. 2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. 3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. 4. Define the problem or problems the author has tried to solve. The Second Stage of Analytical Reading: Rules for Interpreting a Book's Contents 5. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words. 6. Grasp the author's leading propositions by dealing with ^is most important sentences. 7. Know the author's arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences. 8. Determine which of his problems the author has solved. and which he has not; and of the latter, decide which the author knew he had failed to solve. The Third Stage of Analytical Reading: Rules for Criticizing a Book as a Communication of Knowledge A. General Maxims of Intellectual Etiquette 9. Do not begin criticism until you have completed your outline and your interpretation of the book. (Do not say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say 1 understand.") 10. Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously. 11. Demonstrate that you recognize the difference between knowledge and mere personal opinion by presenting good reasons for any critical judgment you make. B. Special Criteria for Points of Criticism 12. Show wherein the author is uninformed. 13. Show wherein the author is misinformed. 14. Show wherein the author is illogical. 15. Show wherein the author's analysis or account is incomplete. Note: Of these last four, the first three are criteria for disagreement. Failing in all of these, you must agree, at least in part, although you may suspend judgment on the whole, in the light of the last point."13- " Few people have ever read any book in this ideal manner, and those who have, probably read very few books this way. The ideal remains, however, the measure of achievement. You are a good reader to the degree in which you approximate it."14- "The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books that, in their day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. They were entitled to become authorities in their own right. In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author. Our intention here is not to lead you from reading to writing. It is rather to remind you that one approaches the ideal of good reading by applying the rules we have described in the reading of a single book, and not by trying? to become superficially acquainted with a larger number. There are, of course, many books worth reading well. There is a much larger number that should be only inspected. To become well-read, in every sense of the word, one must know how to use whatever skill one possesses with discrimination—by reading every book according to its merits."15- "History is the story of what led up to now. It is the present that interests us—that and the future. The future will be partly determined by the present. Thus, you can learn something about the future, too, from a historian, even from one who like Thucydides lived more than two thousand years ago. Let us sum up these two suggestions for reading history. The first is: if you can, read more than one history of an event or period that interests you. The second is: read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way men act in all times and places, especially now."16- "Thus the most important thing to know, when reading any report of current happenings, is who is writing the report. What is involved here is not so much an acquaintance with the reporter himself as with the kind of mind he has. The various sorts of filter-reporters fall into groups. To understand what kind of filter our reporter's mind is, we must ask a series of questions about it. This amounts to asking a series of questions about it. This amounts to asking a series of questions about any material dealing with current events. The questions are these: 1. What does the author want to prove? 2. Whom does he want to convince? 3. What special knowledge does he assume? 4. What Special language does he use? 5. Does he really know what he is talking about?"17- "A curious paradox is involved in any project of syntopical reading. Although this level of reading is defined as the reading of two or more books on the same subject, which implies that the identification of the subject matter occurs before the reading begins, it is in a s sense true that the identification of the subject matter must follow the reading, not precede it. In the case of love, you might have to read a dozen or a hundred works before you could decide what you were reading about. And when you had done that, you might have to conclude that half of the works you had read were not on the subject at all."18- "As we have seen, there are two main stages of syntopical reading. One is preparatory, and the other is syntopical reading proper. Let us write out all of these steps for review.I. Surveying the Field Preparatory to Syntopical Reading 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library, catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first.II. Syntopical Reading of the Bibliography Amassed in Stage I 1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to your subject in Stage I in order to find the most relevant passages. 2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing, whether they actually employ the words or not. 3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not. 4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. You should remember that an issue does not always exist explicitly between or among authors, but that it sometimes has to be constructed by interpretation of the authors' views on matters that may not have been their primary concern. 5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated. Note: Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally. be maintained throughout. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author's views on an issue with an actual quotation from his text."19- "If the book belongs to the second class of books to which we referred before, you find, on returning to it, that there was less there than you remembered. The reason, of course, is that yourself have grown in the meantime. Your mind is fuller. your understanding greater. The book has not changed, but you have. Such a return is inevitably disappointing. But ff the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books-you discover on returning that the hook seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it-whole sets of new things—that you did not see before. Your previous understanding of the book is not invalidated (assuming that you read it well the first time); it is just as true as it ever was, and in the same ways that it was true before. But now it is true in still other ways, too."20- "Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing."

I have always had a nagging feeling that I didn’t know how to read well. This book showed me that I was right. But it also showed me that I wasn’t expected to know how to read well (not with the kind of education most of us receive) and that I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. Reading well involves hard work and precise skills. This book provides the latter — the former is up to us.We take reading for granted because we are supposed to be fully alphabetised at around tenth grade. We are not told that this is just the first level of reading — Elementary Reading (Part 1, Ch. 3) — when you learn to recognise the written symbols and to convey meaning from them. You learn how to grow your vocabulary on your own and to transfer and compare concepts from different reading materials. But most of us stop there. And from there we live the rest of our lives treating books in undeserving ways, wasting too much time on the bad ones and granting so little time to the good ones. The great ones, we hardly read, because they scare us.The problem of wasting time can be drastically diminished by applying the second level of reading — Inspectional Reading (Part 1, Ch. 4). This level means “skimming systematically” to grasp as much as you can from a book in a limited time-frame (possibly just a few minutes). That was an important skill on Adler and Doren’s time when libraries were the norm, but it is even more important now when you have digital previews of a plethora of books in services such as Amazon. If “Customer’s Review” sections existed during their time, I am sure they would also have devoted a portion of Chapter 4 to provide insights on how to better profit from them.The problem of spending little time on the good (or great) books can only be solved by the third level of reading — Analytical reading (Part 2). Without it, you either refrain from reading a good book altogether (specially a great one) or you read it badly. “Reading badly”, the book explains, is to read passively. Reading analytically is very active and it is hard work. To help us in this endeavour, the book provides extensive advice on how to physically mark the books we read (Part 1, Ch. 5). These note-taking techniques are indispensable to read well and the reader is advised to experiment with them and adapt them to his own style of understanding and to the new types of media now available.To read analytically you have to ask yourself a number of questions while reading and you must make your best to answer them yourself. The authors present these questions in sequence, but they are quick to explain that in practice (and with experience) we should try to answer them mostly simultaneously.First, you need to know what the book is about as a whole (Ch. 6 and Ch. 7). This means first categorising the book, then expressing its unity in as few words as possible. You should then proceed to outline its main parts, each of which should be treated as a subordinate whole and have its unity also expressed. This process could continue ad aeternum, but “the degree of approximation varies with the character of the book and your purpose in reading it”. At the end, you should have identified what questions the author wants to answer himself.After this more “descriptive” stage, you should now try to grasp the author’s message (Ch. 8 and Ch. 9). This means first reconciling the grammatical and the logical aspects of what he writes by matching his chosen words with the terms they express. Only then you can identify the important sentences and paragraphs (the grammatical units) in order to establish the author’s leading propositions and arguments (the units of thought and knowledge — the logical units). Once you have reached actual understanding by identifying and interpreting the author’s terms, propositions and arguments, you can now evaluate if the author has answered the questions (the problems) you identified earlier.You and the author are now peers and the best thing you can do now is to praise him by criticising his book (Ch. 10 and Ch. 11). However, in order to do so, there are rules, just like there are rules to reach understanding — there is an intellectual etiquette grounded on rhetorical skills the reader must possess. You should understand first and only then criticise, but not contentiously or disputatiously. You may disagree based on the author’s lack of information, misinformation or reasoning fallacies. You may also judge the author’s completeness as faulty. But the most important maxim is to do so with the sole intention of conveying and discussing knowledge, not opinions. “Knowledge consists in those opinions that can be defended” and “opinion is unsupported judgement.” You must be sure to distinguish between both.So you have described the book, you have understood it and you have criticised it — now what? This is the last (and possibly most important) question you should make. If the book has enlightened you, even if just a little, you must go further — you might even have to act upon it. I like what the authors say about this question applied to historical books: “The answer to the question lies in the direction of practical, political action.” History shows what has been done, so it is a lesson of what we can do or avoid doing. In the same way, whatever the kind of enlightenment you had by reading the book, you have had a glimpse of truth — you can’t ignore it now that you know it.Part 3 is useful in that it provides some interesting aspects of specific types of reading material, namely practical books, history (including biographies and current events), imaginative literature (including plays and poems), science and mathematics, philosophy and the social sciences. While a pleasure to read, it is not imperative that you do so if you have fully grasped the analytical reading process. There is, however, a lot of value in this part of the book, specially in the later chapters, and the reader is strongly advised to read it. One thing I should say is that, while they detail interesting aspects of reading imaginative literature, their techniques mostly apply to expository works. I think their best advice with respect to the former is “don’t try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you”. This means allowing the work to show you “a deeper, or greater reality”. And this reality is “the reality of our inner life”. We don’t need any more rules than this one.The last part of the book presents the fourth (and highest) level of reading — Syntopical reading — or reading two or more books on the same subject. By reading syntopically you are not concerned with understanding each book in all its details — in fact, you won’t read any of the individual books analytically (not at the present syntopical reading effort, at least). Here you are reading each book for what it may contribute to your own problem, not for the book’s own sake. Furthermore, you are not reading to find the truth or to establish your own voice — you would be only one more voice in the conversation. You are simply trying to understand the controversy itself, to establish the many voices you hear in a pure exercise of dialectical objectivity. This is a fantastic topic, which the authors have materialised in their greatest contribution to mankind, in my opinion — the Syntopicon, volumes II and III of the Great Books of the Western World. The reader is very much advised to check it out.The book ends with two appendices. The first one provides a fascinating list of great books — the “endlessly readable” books. The list may seem overwhelming at first glance (and it is!), but the authors are prompt to address the reader and explain that the list does not have any time frame attached to it. I say it should just be begun — even an ignorant reader like me will be so flabbergasted by what he will learn that he will never stop reading it. This is a project for your life as a whole — to never stop reading these books. For a much more restrictive (but also magnificent) reading list, the reader is referred to the 10-year-reading plan provided in Adler’s Great Books.The second appendix provides exercises and tests on all four levels of reading. I must admit that I hadn’t read them until I got this far in my review. I then decided to do it and now I tell you this: just read it. If you have had literature classes as an undergraduate or graduate student, you might find it slightly commonplace. But if you haven’t, like me, you will be glad you read it. Like they state at the beginning of the appendix, the selected texts are "themselves worth reading", so you can’t lose much by doing so. It is a delightful taste of what awaits you in your future exploits of the Great Books — if you do well and accept the challenge, of course.On my part, simply put, this book has changed my life. It not only showed me "how" to read a book, but it also showed me "what" to read. I’ll be forever in debt with two of the greatest absent teachers I’ve had, Dr. Mortimer J. Adler and Dr. Charles Van Doren.