How to read a book?

How to Read a Book

Book by Mortimer J. Adler

What I've learnt from this book:

Since what we have to learn, as we ascend in our education, becomes more difficult or complex, we must improve our ability to read proportionately.

To make the distinction in grades of reading sharper, we must define the criteria of better and worse.

The first criterion is an obvious one. In many fields we measure a man's skill by the difficulty of the task he can perform. We could be moving in circles if we said, for instance, that the more difficult book is one which only the better reader can master. That is true, but not helpful. In order to understand what makes some books more difficult to read than others, we would have to know what demands they make on the skill of the reader

The second criterion takes us further, but is harder to state .

 I have already suggested the distinction between active and passive reading. Now we can define the second criterion for judging reading ability. Given the same thing to read, one man reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more successfully.

But I can do one thing more here which may help you get the feel of what reading is. I can distinguish different types of reading for you. (Jadi, Maksud lo gw mesti usaha lagi? Come on, old geez)

Illustrations of reading

Now, as you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not. If you do, you may have gained information, but you could not have increased your understanding. If, upon effortless inspection, a book is completely intelligible to you, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold. The symbols on the page merely express the common understanding you had before you met. (If you understand in the first try, you may gain information but may not more understand)

 Let us take the second alternative. You do not understand the book perfectly at once. Let us even assume—what unhappily is not always true—that you understand enough to know that you do not understand it all. You know there is more in the book than you understand and, hence, that the book contains something which can increase your understanding.

What do you do then? You can do a number of things. You can take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that troubled you. Or you can get him to recommend a textbook or commentary which will make it all plain by telling you what the author meant. Or you may decide, as many students do, that what's over your head isn't worth bothering about, that you understand enough, and the rest doesn't matter. If you do any of these things, you are not doing the job of reading which the book requires.

What I meant by reading: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more.

There are severalminor points here which you must observe. It is possible to be mistaken in your jedgement of something your reading. You may thing you understand it, and be content with what you get fron an effortless reading, whereas in fact much may have escaped you.

 Thus, a man who knows some of the facts of American history and understands them in a certain light can readily acquire by reding , in the first sense, more such facts and understand them in the same light. But suppose he is reading a history which seeks not merely to give some more facts, but to throw a new and, perhaps, more profound light on all the facts he knows. Suppose there is greater understanding here than he possesses before he starts to read. If he can manage to acquire that greater understanding, he is reading in the second sense.

What are the conditions under which this kind of reading takes place? There are two. In the first place, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be superior to the reader, and his book must convey in readable form the insights he possesses and his potential readers lack. In the second place, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, the communication is perfectly consummated.

To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same and different, and so forth.

The point, however, is not to stop at being informed. It is as wasteful to read a great book solely for information as to use a fountain pen for digging worms.

Being well read too often means the quantity, too seldom the quality, of reading. It was not only the pessimistic and misanthropic Schopenhauer who inveighed against too much reading, because the found that, for the most part, men read passively and glutted themselves with toxic overdoses of unassimilated information.

one must be skilled in the art of being taughter information, reading will take you further

The self-educated man is as rare as the self-made man. Most men do not become genuinely learned or amass large fortunes through their own efforts.

We can avoid effort in learning , but we cannot avoid the results of effortless learning.—the assorted vagaries we collect by letting secondary teachers indoctrinate us.

Suppose there were a college or university in which the faculty was thus composed. Herodotus and Thucydides taught the history of Greece, and Gibbon lectured on the fall of Rome. Plato and St. Thomas gave a course in metaphysics together; Francis Bacon and John Stuart Mill discussed the logic of science; Aristotle, Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant shared the platform on moral problems; Machivelli, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke talked about politics.

At the same time, I am saying that the great books can be read by every man. The help he needs from secondary teachers does not consist of the get-learning-quick substitutes. It consists of help in learning how to read, and more than that when possible, help actually in the course of reading the great books.

While you are in the stage of learning to read, you have to go over a book more than once. If it is worth reading at all, it is worth three reading at least.

In the first place, you must be able to grasp what is being offered as knowledge. In the second place, you must judge whether what is being offered is really acceptable to you as knowledge. In the other words, there is first the task of understanding the book, and second the job of criticizing it.

The process of understanding can be further divided. To understand a book, you must approach it, first, as a whole, having a unity and a structure of parts; and, second, in terms of its elements, its units of language and thought.

Thus, there are three distinct readings, which can be rariously named and described as follows:

 I. The first reading can be called structural or analytic. Here the reader proceeds from the whole to its parts.

II. The second reading can be called interpretative or synthetic. Here the reader proceeds from the parts to the whole.

III. The third reading can be called critical or evaluative. Here the reader judges the author, and decides whether he agrees or disagrees.

In each of these three main divisions, there are several steps to be taken, and hence several rules. 

You have already being introduced to three of the four rules for doing the second reading:

(1) you must discover and interpret the most important words in the book;

 (2) you must do the same for the most important sentences, and

 (3) similarly for the paragraph which express arguments. 

The fourth rule, which I have not yet mentioned, is that you must know which of his problems the author solved, and which he failed on.

To accomplish the first reading you must know

(1) what kind of book it is; that is, the subject matter it is about. 

You must also know (2) what the book as a whole is trying to say; 

(3) into what parts that whole is divided, and 

(4) what the main problems are that the author is trying to solve. 

Here, too, there are four steps and four rules.

Notice that the parts which you come to by analyzing the whole in this first reading are not exactly the same as the parts you start with to construct the whole in the second reading. In the former case, the parts are the ultimate divisions of the author's treatment of his subject matter or problem. In the latter case, the parts are such things as terms, propositions, and syllogisms; that is, the author's ideas, assertions, and arguments.

The third reading also involves a nmumber of steps. There are first several general rules about how you must undertake the task of critism, and then there are a number of critical points you can make-- four in all. The rules for the third reading tell you what points can be made and how to make them.

This suggests an educational principle: perhaps it would be a sound plan to be sure that people knew how to read a whole book before they were encouraged to attend a course of lectures. It does not happen that way in college now. It does not happen in adult education either. Many people think that taking a course of lectures is a short cut to getting what they are not able to read in books. But it is not a short cut to the same goal. In fact, they might as well be going in the opposite direction.

Let me repeat the rule again: you must know what kind of (expository) book you are reading, and you should know this as early in the process as possible, preferably before you begin to read

One other instance of practical writing should be mentioned. An oration—a political speech or a moral exhortation—certainly tries to tell you what you should do or how you should feel about something. Anyone who writes practically about anything not only tries to advise you but also tries to get you to follow his advice. Hence there is an element of oratory in every moral treatise. It is also present in books which try to teach an art, such as this one. I, for example, have tried to persuade you to make the effort to learn to read.

The average high-school graduates has done a great deal of reading, and if he goes on to college he will do a great deal more; but he is likely to be poor and incompetent reader. (Note that this holds true of the average student, not the person who is a subject for special remedial treatment.) He can follow a simple piece of fiction and enjoy it. But put him up against a closely written exposition, a carefully and economically stated argument, or a passage requiring critical consideration, and he is at a loss. It has been shown, for instance, that the average high-school student is amazingly inept at indicating the central thought of a passage, or the levels of emphasis and subordination in an argument or exposition. To all intents and purposes he remains a sixth-grade reader till well along in college.

Knowledge and skill of mind are not the most important items in this life. Loving the right things is more important.

I had read 1/3 of this book and I learned a lot about literature and how important it is to read well....

BUT I had not learnt about reading!