HOW TO READ A BOOK
A Guide to Reading the Great Books
by Mortimer J. Adler
Table of Contents
Preface
PART I . THE ACTIVITY OF READING
CHAPTER ONE To the Average Reader
1 2 3 4
CHAPTER TWO The Reading of "Reading"
1 2 3 4 5
CHAPTER THREE Reading is Learning
1 2 3 4 5 6
CHAPTER FOUR Teachers, Dead or Alive
1 2 3 4 6
CHAPTER FIVE The Defeat of the Schools
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
CHAPTER SIX On Selfhelp
1 2 3 4
PART II . THE RULES
CHAPTER SEVEN From Many Rules to One Habit
1 2 3 4 – 5 – 6
CHAPTER EIGHT Catching on From the Title
1 2 3 4 5
CHAPTER NINE Seeing the Skeleton
1 2 – 3 – 4 5 6 7
CHAPTER TEN Coming to Terms
1 2 3 4 5 6
CHAPTER ELEVEN What's the Proposition and Why
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
CHAPTER TWELVE The Etiquette of Talking Back
1 2 3 4 5
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Things the Reader Can Say
1 2 3 4 5
CHAPTER FOURTEEN And Still More Rules
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
PART III . THE REST OF THE READER'S LIFE
CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Other half
1 2 3 4 5
CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Great Books
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Free Minds and Free Men
1 2 3 4
APPENDIX:
GREAT BOOKS OF THE WESTERN WORLD
Imaginative Literature
HISTORY AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
NATURAL SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS
PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY
GATEWAY TO THE GREAT BOOKS
IMAGINATIVE LITERATURE
CRITICAL ESSAYS
MAN AND SOCIETY
NATURAL SCIENCE
MATHEMATICS
PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS
Preface
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In this special edition of How to read a Book, I can make clear what was not entirely clear when the book was first published in 1940. Readers of the book knew, though its title did not indicate this with complete accuracy, that the subject was not how to read any book, but how to read a great book. In 1940 the time was not yet ripe for such a title, with which the book might not have reached the large audience that it did. Today, with hundreds of thousands of American families engaged in reading and discussing the great gooks — books that alone require the kind of reading described — the situation is much changed. I have therefore added a new subtitle for this edition: A guide to Reading the Great Books.
How to Read a Book attempts to inculcate skills that are useful for reading anything.
These skills, however, are more than merely useful—they are necessary—for the reading of great books, those that are of enduring interest and importance. Although one can read books, magazines, and newspapers of transient interest without these skills, the possession of them enables the reader to read even the transient with greater speed, precision, and discrimination. The are of reading analytically, interpretively, and critically is indispensable only for the kind of reading by which the mind passes form a state of understanding less to a state of understanding more, and for reading the few books that are capable of being read with increasing profit over and over again. those few books are the great books—and the rules of reading here set forth are the rules for reading them. The illustrations that I have given to guide the reader in applying the rules all refer to the great books.
When this book was written, it was based on twenty years of experience in reading and discussing the great books—at Columbia University, at the University of Chicago, and St. John's College in Annapolis, as well as with a number of adult groups. Since then the number of adult groups has multiplied by the thousands; since then many more colleges and universities, as well as secondary schools all over the country, have introduced courses devoted to reading and discussing the great books, for they have come to be recognized as the core of a liberal and humanistic education. But, though these are all advances in American education for which we have good reason to be grateful, the most important educational event since 1940 has been, in my judgment, the publication and
distribution by Encyclopedia Britanica, Incorporated, of Great Books of the Western
World, which has brought the great books into hundreds of thousands of American homes, and into almost every public and school library.
To celebrate the fact, this new edition of How to Read a Book carries a new Appendix that lists the contents of Great Books of the Western World; and also, accordingly, a revised version of Chapter Sixteen. Turn to page 373 and you will find the great books listed there into four main groups: imaginative literature (poetry, fiction, and drama); history and social science; natural science and mathematics; philosophy and theology.
Since 1952, when Great Books of the Western World was published, Encyclopedia Britannica has added a companion set of books, consisting of shorter masterpieces in all fields of literature and learning, properly entitled Gateway to the Great Books. You will find the contents of this set also listed in the Appendix, beginning on page 379.
The present book is, as its subtitle indicates, a guide to reading the things that most deserve careful reading and rereading, and that is why I recommend it to anyone who owns Great Books of the Western World and Gateway to the Great Books. But the owner of these sets has other tools at hand to help him. The Syntopicon, comprising Volumes 2 and 3 of Great Books of the Western World, is a different kind of guide to reading. How to Read a Book is intended to help the reader read a single great book through cover to cover. The Syntopicon helps the reader read through the whole collection of great books by reading what they have to say on any one of three thousand topics of general human interest, organized under 102 great ideas. (You will find the 102 great ideas listed on the jacket of this book.) Volume I of Gateway to the Great Books contains a Syntopical Guide that serves a similar purpose for that set of shorter masterpieces.
One other Britannica publication deserves brief mention here. Unlike each year's best-sellers that are out of date one year later, the great books are the perennials of literature—relevant to the problems that human beings face in every year of every century. That is the way they should be read—for the light they throw upon human life and human society, past, present, and future. And that is why Britannica publishes an annual volume, entitled The Great Ideas Today, the aim of which is to illustrate the striking relevance of the great books and the great ideas to contemporary events and issues, and to the latest advances in the arts and sciences.
With all these aids to reading and to understanding, the accumulated wisdom of our Western civilization is within the reach of anyone who has the willingness to put them to good use.
Mortimer J. Adler
Chicago
September, 1965
PART I .
THE ACTIVITY OF READING
CHAPTER ONE
To the Average Reader
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This is a book for readers who cannot read. They may sound rude, though I do not mean to be. It may sound like a contradiction, but it is not. The appearance of rudeness and contradiction arises only from the variety of senses in which the word "reading" can be used.
The reader who has read thus far surely can read, in some sense of the word. You can guess, therefore, what I must mean. It is that this book is intended for those who can read in some sense of "reading" but not in others. There are many kinds of reading and
degrees of ability to read. It is not contradictory to say that this book is for readers who want to read better or want to read in some other way than they now can.
For whom is this book not intended, then? I can answer that question simply by naming the two extreme cases. There are those who cannot read at all or in any way.: Infants, imbeciles, and other innocents. And there may be those who are masters of the art of reading—who can do every sort of reading and do it as well as is humanly possible.
Most authors would like nothing better than such persons to write for. But a book, such as this, which is concerned with the art of reading itself and which aims to help its readers read better, cannot solicit the attention of the already expert.
Between these two extremes we find the average reader, and that means most of us who have learned our ABC's. We have been started on the road to literacy. But most of us also know that we are not expert readers. We know this in many ways, but most obviously when we find from some things too difficult to read, or have great trouble in reading them; or when someone else has read the same thing we have and shown us how much we missed or misunderstood.
If you have not had experiences of this sort, if you have never felt the effort of reading or known the frustration when all the effort you could summon was not equal to the task, I do not know how to interest you in the problem. Most of us, however, have experienced difficulties in reading, but we do not know why we have trouble or what to do about it.
I think this is because most of us do not regard reading as a complicated activity, involving many different steps in each of which we can acquire more and more skill through practice, as in the case of any other art. We may not even think there is an art of reading. We tend to think of reading almost as if it were something as simple and natural to do as looking or walking. There is no art of looking or walking.
Last summer, while I was writing this book, a young man visited me, He had heard what I was doing, and he came to ask a favor. Would I tell him how to improve his reading? He obviously expected me to answer the question in a few sentences. More than that, he appeared to think that once he had learned the simple prescription, success would be just around the corner.
I tried to explain that it was not so simple. It took many pages of this book, I said, to discuss the various rules of reading and to show how they should be followed. I told him that this book was like a book how to play tennis. As written about in books, the art of tennis consists of rules for manage each of the various strokes, a discussion of how and when to use them, and a description of how to organize these parts into the general strategy of a successful game. The art of reading has to be written about in the same way. There are rules for each of the different steps you must take to complete the reading of a whole book.
He seemed a little dubious. Although he suspected that he did not know how to read, he also seemed to feel that there could not be so much to learn. The young man was a musician. I asked him whether most people, who can hear the sounds, know how to listen to a symphony. His reply was, of course not. I confessed I was one of them, and asked whether he could tell me how to listen to music as a musician expected it to he heard. Of course he could, but not in a few words. Listening to a symphony was a complicated affair. You not only had to keep awake, but there were so many different things to attend to, so many parts of it to distinguish and relate. He could not tell me briefly all that I would have to know. Furthermore, I would have to spend a lot of time listening to music to become a skilled auditor.
Well, I said, the case of reading was similar, If I could learn to hear music, he could learn to read a book, but only on the same conditions. Knowing how to read a book well was like any other art or skill. There were rules to learn and to follow. Through practice good habits must be formed. There were no insurmountable difficulties about it. Only willingness to learn and patience in the process were required.
I do not know whether my answer fully satisfied him. If it didn't, there was one difficulty in the way of his learning to read. He did not yet appreciate what reading involved. Because he still regarded reading as something almost anyone can do, something learned in the primary grades, he may have doubted still that learning to read was just like learning to hear music, to play tennis, or become expert in any other complex use of one's senses and one's mind.
The difficulty is, I fear, one that most of us share. That is why I am going to devote the first part of this book to explaining the kind of activity reading is. For unless you appreciate what is involved, you will not be prepared (as this young man was not when he came to see me) for the kind of instruction that is necessary.
I shall assume, of course, that you want to learn. My help can go no further than you will help yourself. No one can make you learn more of an art than you want to learn or think you need. People often say that they would try to read if they only knew how. As a matter of fact, they might learn how if they would only try. And try they would, if they wanted to learn.
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I did not discover I could not read until after I had left college. I found it out only after I tried to teach others how to read. Most parents have probably made a similar discovery by trying to teach their youngsters. Paradoxically, as a result, the parents usually learn more about reading than their children. The reason is simple. They have to be more active about the business. Anyone who teaches anything has to.
To get back to my story. So far as the registrar's records were concerned, I was one of the satisfactory students in my day at Columbia. We passed courses with creditable marks. The game was easy enough, once you caught on to the tricks. If anyone had told us then that we did not know much or could not read very well, we would have been shocked. We were sure we could listen to lectures and read the books assigned in such a way we could answer examination questions neatly. That was the proof of our ability.
Some of us took one course which increased our self-satisfaction enormously. I had just been started by John Erskine. It ran for two years, was called General Honors, and was open to a select group of juniors and seniors. It consisted of nothing but "reading" the great books, from the Greek classics through the Latin and medieval masterpieces right down to the best books of yesterday, William James, Einstein, and Freud. The books were in all fields: they were histories and books of science or philosophy, dramatic poetry and novels. We discussed them with our teachers one night a week in informal, seminar fashion.
That course had two effects on me. For one thing, it made me think I had struck educational gold for the first time. Here was real stuff, handled in a real way, compared to the textbook and lecture courses that merely made demands on one's memory. But the trouble was I not only thought I had struck gold; I also thought that I owned the mine.
Here were the great books. I knew how to read. The world was my oyster.
If, after graduation, I had gone into business or medicine or law, I would probably still be harboring the conceit that I knew how to read and was well read beyond the ordinary.
Fortunately, something woke me form this dream. For every illusion that the classroom can nourish, there is a school of hard knocks to destroy it. A few years of practice awaken the lawyer and the doctor. Business or newspaper work disillusions the boy who thought he was a trader or a reporter when he finished the school of commerce or journalism. Well, I thought I was liberally educated, that I knew how to read, and had read a lot. The cure for that was teaching, and the punishment that precisely fitted my crime was to having to teach, the year after I graduated, in this very Honors course which had so inflated me.
As a student, I had read all the books I was now going to teach but, being very young and conscientious, I decided to read them again- you know, just to brush up each week for class. To my growing amazement, week after week, I discovered that the books were almost brand new to me. I seemed to be reading them for the first time, these books which I thought I had "mastered" thoroughly.
As time went on, I found out not only that I
did not know very much about any of these books, but also that I did not know how to read them very well. To make up for my ignorance and incompetence I did what any young teacher might do who was afraid of both his students and his job. I used secondary sources, encyclopedias, commentaries, all sorts of books about books about these books. In that way, I thought, I would appear to know more than the students. They wouldn't be able to tell that my questions or points did not come from my better reading of the book they too were working on.
Fortunately for me I was found out, or else I might have been satisfied with getting by as a teaching just as I had got by as a student. If I had succeeded in fooling others, I might soon have deceived myself as well. My first good fortune was in having as a colleague in this teaching Mark Van Doren, the poet. He led off in the discussion of poetry, as I was supposed to do in the case of history, science, and philosophy. He was several years my senior, probably more honest than I, certainly a better reader. Forced to compare my performance with his, I simply could not fool myself. I had not found out what the books contained by reading them, but by reading about them.
My questions about a book were of the sort anyone could ask or answer without having read the book—anyone who had had recourse to the discussion which a hundred secondary sources provide for those who cannot or do not want to read. In contrast, his questions seemed to arise from the pages of the book itself. He actually seemed to have some intimacy with the author. Each book was a large world, infinitely rich for exploration, and woe to the student who answered questions as if, instead of traveling therein, he had been listening to a travelogue. The contrast was too plain, and too much for me. I was not allowed to forget that I did not know to read.
My second good fortune lay in the particular group of students who formed that first class. They were not long in catching on to me. They knew how to use the encyclopedia, or a commentary, or the editor's introduction which usually graces the publication of a classic, just as well as I did. One of them, who has since achieved fame as a critic, was particularly obstreperous. He took what seemed to me endless delight in discussing the various about the book, which could be obtained from secondary sources, always to show me and the rest of the class that the book itself still remained to be discussed. I do not mean that he or the other students could read the book better than I, or had done so. Clearly none of us, with the exception of Mr. Van Doren, was doing the job of reading.
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