How to Read a Book
By Mortimer J. Adler
& Charles Van Doren
Bringing you dear reader, some beautiful excerpts from this lovely book, on the occasion of World Book Day, today, 23 April 2021.
How to Read a Book was first published in ‘the early months of 1940’.
‘This is a book for readers and for those who wish to become readers’.
‘Particularly, it is for readers of books’.
‘Even more particularly, it is for those whose main purpose in reading books is to gain increased understanding’, says Mortimer Adler on the purpose behind this book!
Then Mortimer Adler proceeds to outline the goals of reading thus -
The Goals of Reading –
Reading for Information
Reading for Understanding
Reading for Entertainment
The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us.
Such things may increase our store of information, but they CANNOT improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started.
The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand. Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader's understanding.
The point we want to emphasize here is that this book is about the art of reading for the sake of increased understanding
Of course, there is the third sense - still another goal of reading - besides gaining information and understanding, and that is entertainment.
On Present and Absent Teachers
Listening to a course of lectures, for example, is in many respects like reading a book; and listening to a poem is like reading it. Yet there is good reason to place primary emphasis on reading, and let listening become a secondary concern.
The reason is that -
listening is learning from a teacher who is present - a living teacher - while reading is learning from one who is absent.
If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means.
If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.
Students in school often read difficult books with the help and guidance of teachers.
But for those of us who are not in school, and indeed also for those of us who are when we try to read books that are not required or assigned, our continuing education depends mainly on books alone, read without a teacher's help.
Therefore if we are disposed to go on learning and discovering, we must know how to make books teach us well.
That, indeed, is the primary goal of this book, says Mortimer Adler.
Stages of Learning to Read
[The first level of Reading – Elementary Reading]
The first stage is known by the term "reading readiness."
This begins, it has been pointed out, at birth, and continues normally until the age of about six or seven.
Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing.
Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it.
In the second stage, children learn to read very simple materials.
They usually begin by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year.
Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words. By the end of this period pupils are expected to be reading simple books independently and with enthusiasm.
The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in "unlocking" the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues.
In addition, children at this stage learn to read for different purposes and in different areas of content, such as science, social studies, language arts, and the like. They learn that reading, besides being something one does at school, is also something one can do on one's own, for fun, to satisfy curiosity, or even to "expand one's horizons."
Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired.
Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences - that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject.
This, the mature stage of reading, should be reached by young persons in their early teens. Ideally, they should continue to build on it for the rest of their lives.
THE SECOND LEVEL OF READING: INSPECTIONAL READING
In this case, what you must do is skim the book, or, as some prefer to say, pre-read it.
Skimming or pre-reading is the first sublevel of inspectional reading.
Your main aim is to discover whether the book requires a more careful reading.
LOOK AT THE TITLE PAGE AND, IF THE BOOK HAS ONE, AT ITS PREFACE.
Read each quickly. Note especially the subtitles or other indications of the scope or aim of the book or of the author's special angle on his subject.
STUDY THE TABLE OF CONTENTS to obtain a general sense of the book's structure; use it as you would a road map before taking a trip.
It is astonishing how many people never even glance at a book's table of contents unless they wish to look something up in it.
In fact, many authors spend a considerable amount of time in creating the table of contents, and it is sad, to think their efforts are often wasted.
CHECK THE INDEX if the book has one! Most expository works do. Make a quick estimate of the range of topics covered and of the kinds of books and authors referred to.
If the book is a new one with a dust jacket, READ THE PUBLISHER's BLURB.
Some people have the impression that the blurb is never anything but sheer puffery. But this is quite often not true, especially in the case of expository works.
Finally, TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT. Thumb through the book in this way, always looking for signs of the main contention, listening for the basic pulsebeat of the matter.
THE ESSENCE OF ACTIVE READING
The Four Basic Questions a Reader Asks
There are four main questions you must ask about any book.
1. WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT AS A WHOLE? You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.
4. 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?
How to Make a Book Your Own
If you have the habit of asking a book questions as you read, you are a better reader than if you do not.
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it-which comes to the same thing-is by writing in it.
The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading
The Importance of Classifying Books
The first rule of analytical reading can be expressed as follows -
RULE 1. YOU MUST KNOW WHAT KIND OF BOK YOU ARE READING, AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS AS EARLY IN THE PROCESS AS POSSIBLE, PREFERABLY BEFORE YOU BEGIN TO READ.
You must know, for instance, whether you are reading fiction-a novel, a play, an epic, a lyric - or whether it is an expository work of some sort.
Almost every reader knows a work of fiction when he sees it. Or so it seems-and yet this is not always easy.
Is Portnoy's Complaint a novel or a psychoanalytical study?
Is Naked Lunch a fiction or a tract against drug abuse, similar to the books that used to recount the horrors of alcohol for the betterment of readers?
Is Gone with the Wind a romance or a history of the South before and during the Civil War?
Do Main Street and The Grapes of Wrath belong in the category of belles-lettres or are both of them sociological studies, the one concentrating on urban experiences, the other on agrarian life?
X-RAYING A BOOK
Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers. Your job as an analytical reader is to find it.
A book comes to you with flesh on its bare bones and clothes over its flesh.
It is all dressed up. You do not have to undress it or tear the flesh off its limbs to get at the firm structure that underlies the soft surface.
But you must read the book with X-ray eyes, for it is an essential part of your apprehension of any book to grasp its structure.
The second rule of analytical reading can be expressed as follows -
RULE 2.
STATE THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE BOOK IN A SINGLE SENTENCE, OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES (A SHORT PARAGRAPH)
The third rule can be expressed as follows –
RULE 3.
SET FORTH THE MAJOR PARTS OF THE BOOK, AND SHOW HOW THESE ARE ORGANIZED INTO A WHOLE, BY BEING ORDERED TO ONE ANOTHER AND TO THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE!
The reason for this rule should be obvious. If a work of art were absolutely simple, it would, of course, have no parts. But that is never the case.
There is a difference between a heap of bricks, on the one hand, and the single house they can constitute, on the other.
There is a difference between a single house and a collection of houses.
A book is like a single house.
It is a mansion having many rooms, rooms on different levels, of different sizes and shapes, with different outlooks, with different uses.
The rooms are independent, in part. Each has its own structure and interior decoration. But they are not absolutely independent and separate.
They are connected by doors and arches, by corridors and stairways, by what architects call a "traffic pattern."
Because they are connected, the partial function that each performs contributes its share to the usefulness of the whole house. Otherwise the house would not be livable.
The analogy is almost perfect.
A good book, like a good house, is an orderly arrangement of parts. Each major part has a certain amount of independence. As we will see, it may have an interior structure of its own, and it may be decorated in a different way from other parts.
But it must also be connected with the other parts-that is, related to them functionally-for otherwise it would not contribute its share to the intelligibility of the whole.
As houses are more or less livable, so books are more or less readable.
The most readable book is an architectural achievement on the part of the author. The best books are those that have the most intelligible structure.
Of Plots and Plans: Stating the Unity of a Book
Let us return now to the second rule, which requires you to state the unity of a book.
A few illustrations of the rule in operation may guide you in putting it into practice.
Let us begin with a famous case.
You probably read Homer's Odyssey in school. If not, you must know the story of Odysseus, or Ulysses, as the Romans call him, the man who took ten years to return from the siege of Troy only to find his faithful wife Penelope herself besieged by suitors.
It is an elaborate story as Homer tells it, full of exciting adventures on land and sea, replete with episodes of all sorts and many complications of plot.
But it also has a single unity of action, a main thread of plot that ties everything together.
Aristotle, in his Poetics, insists that this is the mark of every good story, novel, or play. To support his point, he shows how the unity of the Odyssey can be summarized in a few sentences.
A certain man is absent from home for many years; he is jealously watched by Poseidon, and left desolate. Meanwhile his home is in a wretched plight; suitors are wasting his substance and plotting against his son. At length, tempest-tossed, he himself arrives; he makes certain persons acquainted with him; he attacks the suitors with his own hand, and is himself preserved while he destroys them.
"This," says Aristotle, "is the essence of the plot; the rest is episode."
After you know the plot in this way, and through it the unity of the whole narrative, you can put the parts into their proper places.
You might find it a good exercise to try this with some novels you have read.
To be continued…
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