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 Mortimer Adler and Charles van Dorens book on reading methodology never fails to draw a laugh when I take it out in public. Yet its one of the most useful, and well-used, books on my bookshelf. This is a practical book, filled with solid, step-by-step instructions to help you read quickly, actively, and effectively. Adlers approach can be summed up as Dont focus on reading everything as fast as possible. Rather focus on knowing the right speed, and knowing which material should be read each way. Among the topics covered:
- Inspectional Reading
- How to read any book in 30 minutes or less
- What to read during this stage
- How to find the key points
- The four questions every reader should ask
- What is the book about as a whole?
- What is being said in detail, and how?
- Is the book true, in whole or in part?
- What of it?
- Analytical reading
- Categorizing and X-raying a book
- Finding the key terms and understanding them
- Finding the authors message
- Criticizing a book
- Agreeing or disagreeing with an author
- Note taking, tagging (in the offline sense), and making a book your own.
- Building a reading framework
- Syntopical reading
- Understanding the conversation between authors
- Finding the relevant agreements and disagreements between them
Over the years Ive read a number of books by Colin Rose, Bobbi DePorter, Tony Buzan, Joyce Wycoff, and others that claim to improve reading speed and comprehension. Though each of them provides useful tips, none offers as thorough and effective a framework as Adler and van Doren.
But detailed frameworks are not easy to master. I frequently find myself taking the book out for reference, even though Ive read it a number of times. Each time I read, or re-read, a particular section, I come away with a new insight about how to evaluate, critique, or compare books. To me, this is the hallmark of a great book.
The latter sections of the book contain instructions on applying Adlers process to specific types of reading non-fiction, imaginative literature, stories and plays, history, science and mathematics, philosophy, and social science. If I have never read, or havent read in some time, one of these genres its helpful to review just the section on that genre before I start.
Be aware of the books style as, at first, it can be a bit off-putting. While not a complex book, it is written in classic prose that is, its somewhat verbose. Today we would call it over-written, but it was originally authored in the 1940s, and updated in the early 1970s well before the modern, web-centric era of short, pithy text and summaries. This doesnt bother me. I still find Adlers erudition and style entertaining. But I recognize it may bother some readers. Still, I think it worth working through if your goal is to be the most effective reader possible.
The book could easily serve as the text for a semester-long course in effective reading at the high school or undergrad levels. I wish Id had such a course. If Adlers techniques were taught to all high school students wed have a far more literate and thinking population than we seem to have today.
Even if you live in the world of the web, Adlers techniques for deriving the authors meaning, understanding propositions and assertions, and thinking critically about what is said are valuable. They can help you avoid the common confusion between a fact and a mere assertion, and better question whether the author has used sound logic.
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Terry,
Can you explain further how this book helps you specifically. One more book for me to read and I'd like to hear more of the day-to-day practical benefits.
David
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On 10/05/2005 David Buchan wrote:
Can you explain further how this book helps you specifically.
One more book for me to read and I'd like to hear more of the
day-to-day practical benefits. Succinctly, How To Read A Book (HTRB) is a tool for reading difficult expository works. Adler, being borne of the encyclopedic era, was quite old school and spent a lot of time on the works of Plato, Aristotle, Mill, Locke, et al. In HRTB he shares the methodology and process he used for understanding them, comparing them, and vetting his own ideas and conclusions.
Much as Getting Things Done offers a framework for managing and prioritizing competing tasks, HTRB provides tools to manage and prioritize competing ideas. Also like GTD, the framework is intended to be active - that is, practiced in the pursuit of something else. For Adler this something else was understanding the relative merits and importance of arguments put forth in writing.
Today I keep the book around as a check list, to make sure I covered all the bases if I'm reading something important. It's most useful when I dig into a complex topic like privacy, identity, or copyright law where lots of people have strongly held, conflicting opinions. And where separating fact from opinion is challenging. Socio-cultural issues are another area. The conflicting ideas of people like William Henry (In Defense of Elitism,) Alfie Kohn (No Contest,) Robert Sheaffer (Resentment Against Achievement) are not at all helpful unless you can put them in context, vet them, and know why you agree or disagree. As Adler says, "The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks."
If you read lots of fiction or literature, where the goal is entertainment, you don't need HTRB. Likewise, if you read mostly simple books, or only one book on a topic, you won't usually want to invest the time the HTRB process takes. Where it shines is when you read a lot, and read multiple books on a single - or similar - topic. His idea that "reading should be a conversation between you and the author" only works when the author is trying to convince you of something. Adler's process ensures there's some rigor in that conversation. Frankly, Adler's reading process is more rigorous than many author's writing process. And, if used consistently, would probably lead to debunking the vast majority of books on today's bookshelf. But that's beside the point. The point is Adler gives you tools to be able to figure out for yourself whether a book is really worth reading, and to know you understand what it means when you're done.
Most useful to me have been the chapters with step-by-step instructions, such as Chapter 5 - "How To Be A Demanding Reader" - wherein Adler offers specific rules for "active" reading, as well as questions to ask and techniques to use at each step.
- The four questions a reader should ask
- How to make a book your own - conversing with the author, marking, thinking
- Three kinds of note-making. Different techniques for inspectional, analytical, and syntopical reading - structural, conceptual, dialectical
Also Part Three (Chapters 6-11) on analytical reading, criticizing a book, and agreeing or disagreeing. Adler offers 11 rules in this section:
- Classify the book according to kind and subject matter
- State, briefly, what the book is about (doing this is actually hard)
- Enumerate the major parts and outline them as you have the whole
- Define the problem, or problems, the author is trying to solve
- Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words
- Grasp the authors leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences
- Know the author's arguments by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences (not paragraphs)
- Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not; and as to the later, decide which the author knew he failed to solve
- Do not respond until you understand
- Disagree reasonably, not contentiously
- Respect the difference between knowledge and opinion by giving reasons for any critical judgements
I don't do all of these every time, as most books aren't worth the effort. But the nice thing about the framework is you apply it only as much as required. From scanning, inspecting, and analyzing to comparative research, just use what you need.
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