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How To Read A Book



cover_big.jpg Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren’s book on reading methodology never fails to draw a laugh when I take it out in public. Yet it’s 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. Adler’s approach can be summed up as “Don’t 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 author’s 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 I’ve 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 I’ve 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 Adler’s 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 haven’t read in some time, one of these genres it’s helpful to review just the section on that genre before I start.

Be aware of the book’s style as, at first, it can be a bit off-putting. While not a complex book, it is written in classic prose – that is, it’s 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 doesn’t bother me. I still find Adler’s 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 I’d had such a course. If Adler’s techniques were taught to all high school students we’d have a far more literate and thinking population than we seem to have today.

Even if you live in the world of the web, Adler’s techniques for deriving the author’s 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.