How
to
Read
a
Book
Revised And Updated Edition
by
Mortimer J. Adler
and
Charles Van Doren
A TOUCHSTONE BOOK
Published by Simon & Schuster
New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore
Contents
Preface
Part One – The Dimensions of Reading
Chapter 1 – The Activity And Art Of Reading
Active Reading
The Goals of Reading: Reading for Information and Reading for Understanding
Reading as Learning: The Difference Between Learning by Instruction and Learning by Discovery
Present and Absent Teachers
Chapter 2 – The Levels Of Reading
Chapter 3 – The First Level Of Reading: Elementary Reading
Stages of Learning to Read
Stages and Levels
Higher Levels of Reading and Higher Education
Reading and the Democratic Ideal of Education
Chapter 4 – The Second Level Of Reading: Inspectional Reading
Inspectional Reading I: Systematic Skimming or Pre-reading
Inspectional Reading II: Superficial Reading
On Reading Speeds
Fixations and Regressions
The Problem of Comprehension
Summary of Inspectional Reading
Chapter 5 – How To Be A Demanding Reader
The Essence of Active Reading: The Four Basic Questions a Reader Asks
How to Make a Book Your Own
The Three Kinds of Note-making
Forming the Habit of Reading
From Many Rules to One Habit
Part Two – The Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading
Chapter 6 – Pigeonholing A Book
The Importance of Classifying Books
What You Can Learn from the Title of a Book
Practical vs. Theoretical Books
Kinds of Theoretical Books
Chapter 7 – X-Raying A Book
Of Plots and Plans: Stating the Unity of a Book
Mastering the Multiplicity: The Art of Outlining a Book
The Reciprocal Arts of Reading and Writing
Discovering the Author’s Intentions
The First Stage of Analytical Reading
The First Stage of Analytical Reading, or Rules for Finding What a Book Is About
Chapter 8 – Coming To Terms With An Author
Words vs. Terms
Finding the Key Words
Technical Words and Special Vocabularies
Finding the Meanings
Chapter 9 – Determining An Author’s Message
Sentences vs. Propositions
Finding the Key Sentences
Finding the Propositions
Finding the Arguments
Finding the Solutions
The Second Stage of Analytical Reading
The Second Stage of Analytical Reading, or Rules for Finding What a Book Says (Interpreting Its Contents)
Chapter 10 – Criticizing A Book Fairly
Teachability as a Virtue
The Role of Rhetoric
The Importance of Suspending Judgment
The Importance of Avoiding Contentiousness
On the Resolution of Disagreements
Chapter 11 – Agreeing Or Disagreeing With An Author
Prejudice and Judgment
Judging the Author’s Soundness
Judging the Author’s Completeness
The Third Stage of Analytical Reading
I. The First Stage of Analytical Reading: Rules for Finding What a Book Is About
II. The Second Stage of Analytical Reading: Rules for Interpreting a Book’s Contents
III. The Third Stage of Analytical Reading: Rules for Criticizing a Book as a Communication of Knowledge
Chapter 12 – Aids To Reading
The Role of Relevant Experience
Other Books as Extrinsic Aids to Reading
How to Use Commentaries and Abstracts
How to Use Reference Books
How to Use a Dictionary
How to Use an Encyclopedia
Part Three – Approaches to Different Kinds of Reading Matter
Chapter 13 – How To Read Practical Books
The Two Kinds of Practical Books
The Role of Persuasion
What Does Agreement Entail in the Case of a Practical Book?
Chapter 14 – How To Read Imaginative Literature
How Not to Read Imaginative Literature
General Rules for Reading Imaginative Literature
Chapter 15 – Suggestions For Reading Stories, Plays, And Poems
How to Read Stories
A Note About Epics
How to Read Plays
A Note About Tragedy
How to Read Lyric Poetry
Chapter 16 – How To Read History
The Elusiveness of Historical Facts
Theories of History
The Universal in History
Questions to Ask of a Historical Book
How to Read Biography and Autobiography
How to Read About Current Events
A Note on Digests
Chapter 17 – How To Read Science And Mathematics
Understanding the Scientific Enterprise
Suggestions for Reading Classical Scientific Books
Facing the Problem of Mathematics
Handling the Mathematics in Scientific Books
A Note on Popular Science
Chapter 18 – How To Read Philosophy
The Questions Philosophers Ask
Modern Philosophy and the Great Tradition
On Philosophical Method
On Philosophical Styles
Hints for Reading Philosophy
On Making Up Your Own Mind
A Note on Theology
How to Read “Canonical” Books
Chapter 19 – How To Read Social Science
What Is Social Science?
The Apparent Ease of Reading Social Science
Difficulties of Reading Social Science
Reading Social Science Literature
Part Four – The Ultimate Goals of Reading
Chapter 20 – The Fourth Level Of Reading: Syntopical Reading
The Role of Inspection in Syntopical Reading
The Five Steps in Syntopical Reading
The Need for Objectivity
An Example of an Exercise in Syntopical Reading: The Idea of Progress
The Syntopicon and How to Use It
On the Principles That Underlie Syntopical Reading
Summary of Syntopical Reading
I. Surveying the Field Preparatory to Syntopical Reading
II. Syntopical Reading of the Bibliography Amassed in Stage I
Chapter 21 – Reading And The Growth Of The Mind
What Good Books Can Do for Us
The Pyramid of Books
The Life and Growth of the Mind
Appendix A – A Recommended Reading List
Appendix B – Exercises and Tests at the Four Levels of Reading
Introductory
I. Exercises and Tests at the First Level of Reading: Elementary Reading
John Stuart Mill 1806-1873
Test A: Questions about the biographical sketch of John Stuart Mill
Sir Isaac Newton 1642-1727
Test B: Questions about the biography o
f Sir Isaac Newton
II. Exercises and Tests at the Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading
Dante Alighieri 1265-1321
Table of Contents of the Divine Comedy
Test C: First series of questions about the Divine Comedy of Dante
Test D: Further questions about Dante’s Divine Comedy
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
Table of Contents of The Origin of Species
Test E: Questions about Darwin and about The Origin of Species
Test F: Further questions about Darwin and The Origin of Species
III. Exercises and Tests at the Third Level of Reading: Analytical Reading
IV. Exercises and Tests at the Fourth Level of Reading: Syntopical Reading
From Book I of Aristotle’s Politics
From Book I of Rousseau’s The Social Contract
Test G: Here is the first set of questions about Aristotle and Rousseau
Test H: Here is the second set of questions
Answers to Questions
Footnotes
Index
Publication Information
About How to Read a Book
Copyright Notice
eBook Version Notes
Preface
p. ix How to Read a Book was first published in the early months of 1940. To my surprise and, I confess, to my delight, it immediately became a best seller and remained at the top of the nationwide best-seller list for more than a year. Since 1940, it has continued to be widely circulated in numerous printings, both hardcover and paperback, and it has been translated into other languages—French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Italian. Why, then, attempt to recast and rewrite the book for the present generation of readers?
The reasons for doing so lie in changes that have taken place both in our society in the last thirty years and in the subject itself. Today many more of the young men and women who complete high school enter and complete four years of college; a much larger proportion of the population has become literate in spite of or even because of the popularity of radio and television. There has been a shift of interest from the reading of fiction to the reading of nonfiction. The educators of the country have acknowledged that teaching the young to read, in the most elementary sense of that word, is our paramount educational problem. A recent Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, designating the seventies as the Decade of Reading, has dedicated federal funds in support of a wide variety of efforts to improve p. x proficiency in this basic skill, and many of those efforts have scored some success at the level at which children are initiated into the art of reading. In addition, adults in large numbers have been captivated by the glittering promises made by speed-reading courses—promises to increase their comprehension of what they read as well as their speed in reading it.
However, certain things have not changed in the last thirty years. One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.” Since speed-reading has become a national fad, this new edition of How to Read a Book deals with the problem and proposes variable-speed-reading as the solution, the aim being to read better, always better, but sometimes slower, sometimes faster.
Another thing that has not changed, unfortunately, is the failure to carry instruction in reading beyond the elementary level. Most of our educational ingenuity, money, and effort is spent on reading instruction in the first six grades. Beyond that, little formal training is provided to carry students to higher and quite distinct levels of skill. That was true in 1939 when Professor James Mursell of Columbia University’s Teachers College wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Failure of the Schools.” What he said then, in two paragraphs that I am now going to quote, is still true.
Do pupils in school learn to read their mother tongue effectively? Yes and no. Up to the fifth and sixth grade, reading, on the whole, is effectively taught and well learned. To that level we find a steady and general improvement, but beyond it the curves flatten out to a dead level. This is not because a person arrives at his natural limit of efficiency when he reaches the sixth grade, for it has been shown again and again that with special tuition much older children, and also adults, can make enormous improvement. Nor does it mean that most sixth-graders read well enough for all p. xi practical purposes. A great many pupils do poorly in high school because of sheer ineptitude in getting meaning from the printed page. They can improve; they need to improve; but they don’t.
The average high-school graduate 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 a 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.
If there was a need for How to Read a Book thirty years ago, as the reception of the first edition of the book would certainly seem to indicate, the need is much greater today. But responding to that greater need is not the only, nor, for that matter, the main motive in rewriting the book. New insights into the problems of learning how to read; a much more comprehensive and better-ordered analysis of the complex art of reading; the flexible application of the basic rules to different types of reading, in fact to every variety of reading matter; the discovery and formulation of new rules of reading; and the conception of a pyramid of books to read, broad at the bottom and tapering at the top—all these things, not treated adequately or not treated at all in the book that I wrote thirty years ago, called for exposition and demanded the thorough rewriting that has now been done and is here being published.
The year after How to Read a Book was published, a parody of it appeared under the title How to Read Two Books; and Professor I. A. Richards wrote a serious treatise entitled How to Read a Page. I mention both these sequels in order to p. xii point out that the problems of reading suggested by both of these titles, the jocular as well as the serious one, are fully treated in this rewriting, especially the problem of how to read a number of related books in relation to one another and read them in such a way that the complementary and conflicting things they have to say about a common subject are clearly grasped.
Among the reasons for rewriting How to Read a Book, I have stressed the things to be said about the art of reading and the points to be made about the need for acquiring higher levels of skill in this art, which were not touched on or developed in the original version of the book. Anyone who wishes to discover how much has been added can do so quickly by comparing the present Table of Contents with that of the original version. Of the four parts, only Part Two, expounding the rules of Analytical Reading, closely parallels the content of the original, and even that has been largely recast. The introduction in Part One of the distinction of four levels of reading—elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical—is the basic and controlling change in the book’s organization and content. The exposition in Part Three of the different ways to approach different kinds of reading materials—practical and theoretical books, imaginative literature (lyric poetry, epics, novels, plays), history, science and mathematics, social science, and philosophy, as well as reference books, current journalism, and even advertising—is the most extensive addition that has been made. Finally, the discussion of Syntopical Reading in Part Four is wholly new.
In the work of updating, r
ecasting, and rewriting this book, I have been joined by Charles Van Doren, who for many years now has been my associate at the Institute for Philosophical Research. We have worked together on other books, notably the twenty-volume Annals of America, published by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., in 1969. What is, perhaps, more relevant to the present cooperative venture in which we have been engaged as co-authors is that during the p. xiii last eight years Charles Van Doren and I have worked closely together in conducting discussion groups on great books and in moderating executive seminars in Chicago, San Francisco, and Aspen. In the course of these experiences, we acquired many of the new insights that have gone into the rewriting of this book.
I am grateful to Mr. Van Doren for the contribution he has made to our joint effort; and he and I together wish to express our deepest gratitude for all the constructive criticism, guidance, and help that we have received from our friend Arthur L. H. Rubin, who persuaded us to introduce many of the important changes that distinguish this book from its predecessor and make it, we hope, a better and more useful book.
MORTIMER J. ADLER
Boca Grande
March 26, 1972
How
to
Read
a
Book
p. xv
Part One – The Dimensions of Reading
Chapter 1 – The Activity And Art Of Reading
p. 3 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.
By “readers” we mean people who are still accustomed, as almost every literate and intelligent person used to be, to gain a large share of their information about and their understanding of the world from the written word. Not all of it, of course; even in the days before radio and television, a certain amount of information and understanding was acquired through spoken words and through observation. But for intelligent and curious people that was never enough. They knew that they had to read too, and they did read.
There is some feeling nowadays that reading is not as necessary as it once was. Radio and especially television have taken over many of the functions once served by print, just as photography has taken over functions once served by painting and other graphic arts. Admittedly, television serves some of these functions extremely well; the visual communication of news events, for example, has enormous impact. The ability of radio to give us information while we are engaged in doing other things—for instance, driving a car—is remarkable, and a great saving of time. But it may be seriously questioned p. 4 whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Page 1
