How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

by Mortimer J. Adler

  This should never be the primary consideration, and it leads, when it is overdone, to the so-called pathetic fallacy. But we should remember that words do not write themselves—the ones we read have been found and written down by a living man. Plato and Aristotle said some similar, and some dissimilar, things; but even if they had agreed completely, they could not have written the same books, for they were different men. We may even discover something of St. Thomas Aquinas in such an apparently unrevealing work as the Summa Theologica.

  Thus it matters very little that formal autobiography is a relatively new literary genre. No one has ever been able to keep himself entirely out of his book. “I have no more made my book,” said Montaigne, “than my book has made me; a book co-substantial with its author, concerned with my own p. 248 self, an integral part of my life.” And he added, “Everyone recognizes me in my book, and my book in me.” This is true, and not only of Montaigne. “This is no book,” says Whitman of his Leaves of Grass. “Who touches this touches a man.”

  Are there any additional hints for reading biographies and autobiographies? Here is one that is important. Despite the fact that such books, and especially the autobiographies, reveal much about their authors, we should not spend so much time trying to discover a writer’s secrets that we do not find out what he says plainly. Apart from this, given the fact that such books are often more poetical than discursive or philosophical, and that they are special kinds of history, there is perhaps little more to add. You should remember, of course, that if you wish to know the truth about a person’s life, you should read as many biographies of him as you can find, including his own account of his life, if he wrote one. Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying. As to the question, What of it?, we would only say this: biography, like history, can be a cause of practical, moral action. A biography can be inspiring. It is the story of a life, usually a more or less successful one—and we too have lives to lead.

  How to Read About Current Events

  We have said that our exposition of the art of analytical reading applies to everything you have to read, not just to books. Now we want to qualify that statement a little. Analytical reading is not always necessary. There are many things that we read that do not require the kind of effort and skill that is called for at this third level of reading ability. Nevertheless, although the rules of reading do not all always have to be applied, the four questions must always be asked of anything p. 249 you read. That means, of course, that they must be asked when you are faced with the kind of things to which most of us devote much of our reading time: newspapers, magazines, books about current events, and the like.

  After all, history did not stop a thousand years ago, or a hundred. The world goes on, and men and women continue to write about what is happening and how things are changing. Perhaps no modern history is as great as Thucydides’ work; posterity will have to be the judge of that. But we do have an obligation, as human beings and as citizens, to try to understand the world around us.

  The problem comes down to knowing what is actually happening now. We have chosen the word “actually” in the last sentence intentionally. The French word for newsreel is actualités; the whole concept of current events literature is somehow the same as that of the “news.” How do we get the news, and how do we know that what we get is true?

  You can see at once that we are faced with the same problem that is posed by history itself. We cannot be sure that we are getting at the facts—we cannot be sure that we know what is happening now any more than we can be sure about what happened in the past. And yet we must try to know, so far as that is possible.

  If we could be everywhere at once, overhear all conversations on earth, look into the heart of every living person, we might be able to make a stab at the truth of current events. Being human and hence limited, we must fall back on the services of reporters. Reporters are persons who are supposed to know what is happening in a small area. They report it in newspaper stories, in magazines, or in books. What we can know depends on them.

  Ideally, a reporter, of whatever kind, is a clear glass in which reality is reflected—or through which it shines. But the human mind is not a clear glass. It is not a good reflector, and when reality shines through it, the mind is not a very good filter. It separates out what it considers to be unreality, unp. 250truth. That is proper, of course; a reporter should not report what he thinks is false. But he may be mistaken.

  Thus the most important thing to know, when reading any report of current happenings, is who is writing the report. What is involved here is not so much an acquaintance with the reporter himself as with the kind of mind he has. The various sorts of filter-reporters fall into groups. To understand what kind of filter our reporter’s mind is, we must ask a series of questions about it. This amounts to asking a series of questions about any material dealing with current events. The questions are these:

  1. What does the author want to prove?

  2. Whom does he want to convince?

  3. What special knowledge does he assume?

  4. What special language does he use?

  5. Does he really know what he is talking about?

  For the most part it is safe to assume that all current events books want to prove something. Often it is easy enough to discover what this is. The blurb often states the main contention or thesis of such books. If it does not appear there, it may be stated by the author in a preface.

  Having asked what the book is trying to prove, you should next ask whom the author is trying to convince. Is the book intended for those “in the know”—and are you in that category? Is it for that small group of persons who can do something, and quickly, about the situation the author describes? Or is it for everyone? If you do not belong to the audience for which the book is intended, you may not want to read it.

  You must next discover what special knowledge the author assumes that you have. The word “knowledge” is intended here to cover a lot of ground. “Opinion” or “prejudice” might have been a better choice. Many authors write only for readers who agree with them. If you disagree sharply with a reporter’s assumptions, you may only be irritated if you try to read his book.

  p. 251 The assumptions that an author makes, and that he assumes you share, are sometimes very difficult to discover. In The Seventeenth Century Background, Basil Willey has this to say:

  . . . it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one’s own habitual assumptions; “doctrines felt as facts” can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician.

  He goes on to suggest that it is easier to discover the “doctrines felt as facts” of an age different from our own, and that is what he attempts to do in his book. In reading books about our own time, however, we do not have the advantage of distance. Thus we must try to see through the filter not only of the author-reporter’s mind, but also of our own.

  Next, you must ask if there is a special language that the author uses. This is particularly important in reading magazines and newspapers, but it also applies to all books about current history. Certain words provoke special responses from us, responses that they might not provoke from other readers a century hence. An example of such a word is “Communism” or “Communist.” We should try to control these responses, or at least know when they occur.

  Finally, you must consider the last of the five questions, which is probably the hardest to answer. Does the reporter whose work you are reading himself know the facts? Is he privy to the perhaps secret thoughts and decisions of the persons about whom he is writing? Does he know all that he should know in order to give a fair and balanced account of the situation?

  What we are suggesting, in other words, is that the possible bias of the author-reporter is not the only thing that
has to be considered. We have heard a good deal lately about the “management of the news”; it is important to realize that this applies not only to us, as members of the public, but also to reporters who are supposed to be “in the know.” They may not p. 252 be. With the best good will in the world, with every intention of providing us with the truth of the matter, a reporter may still be “uninformed” with regard to secret actions, treaties, and so forth. He himself may be aware of this, or he may not. In the latter case, of course, the situation is especially perilous for his reader.

  You will note that these five questions are really only variations on the questions we have said you must ask of any expository book. Knowing an author’s special language, for example, is nothing more than coming to terms with him. But because current books and other material about the contemporary world pose special problems for us as readers, we have stated the questions in a different way.

  Perhaps it is most useful to sum up the difference in a warning rather than a set of rules for reading books of this kind. The warning is this: Caveat lector—“Let the reader beware.” Readers do not have to be wary when reading Aristotle, or Dante, or Shakespeare. But the author of any contemporary book may have—though he does not necessarily have—an interest in your understanding it in a certain way. Or if he does not, the sources of his information may have such an interest. You should know that interest, and take it into account in whatever you read.

  A Note on Digests

  There is another consequence of our basic distinction—the distinction between reading for information and reading for understanding—that underlies everything we have said about reading. And this is that sometimes we have to read for information about understanding—to find out how others have interpreted the facts. Let us try to explain what this means.

  For the most part, we read newspapers and magazines, and even advertising matter, for the information they contain. The amount of such material is vast, so vast that no one today p. 253 has time to read more than a small fraction of it. Necessity has been the mother of a number of good inventions in the field of such reading. The news magazines, for instance, such as Time and Newsweek, perform an invaluable function for most of us by reading the news and reducing it to its essential elements of information. The men who write these magazines are primarily readers. They have developed the art of reading for information to a point far beyond the average reader’s competence.

  The same is true of a publication like Reader’s Digest, which professes to bring us in condensed form much that is worth our attention in current general magazines to the compact scope of a single, small volume. Of course, the very best articles, like the best books, cannot be condensed without loss. If the essays of Montaigne, for example, were appearing in a current periodical, we would scarcely be satisfied to read a digest of them. A summary, in this case, would function well only if it impelled us to read the original. For the average article, however, a condensation is usually adequate, and often even better than the original, because the average article is mainly informational. The skill that produces Reader’s Digest and the scores of similar periodicals is, first of all, a skill in reading, and only then one of writing simply and clearly. It does for us what few of us have the technique—even if we had the time—to do for ourselves. It cuts the core of solid information out of pages and pages of less substantial stuff.

  But, after all, we still have to read the periodicals that accomplish these digests of current news and information. If we wish to be informed, we cannot avoid the task of reading, no matter how good the digests are. And the task of reading them is, in the last analysis, the same task as that which is performed by the editors of these magazines on the original material that they make available in more compact form. They have saved us labor, so far as the extent of our reading is concerned, but they have not saved us and cannot entirely save us the trouble of reading. In a sense, the function they perform p. 254 profits us only if we can read their digests of information as well as they have done the prior reading in order to give us the digests.

  And that involves reading for understanding as well as information. Obviously, the more condensed a digest is, the more selection has occurred. We may not have to worry about this very much if 1,000 pages are cut down to 900, say; but if 1,000 pages are cut to ten, or even one, then the question of what has been left out becomes critical. Hence the greater the condensation, the more important it is that we know something of the character of the condensor; the same caveat we mentioned before applies here with even greater force. Ultimately, perhaps, this comes down to reading between the lines of an expert condensation. You cannot refer to the original to find out what was left out; you must somehow infer this from the condensation itself. Reading digests, therefore, is sometimes the most demanding and difficult reading that you can do.

  Chapter 17 – How To Read Science And Mathematics

  p. 255 The title of this chapter may be misleading. We do not propose to give you advice about how to read every kind of science and mathematics. We will confine ourselves to discussing only two kinds: the great scientific and mathematical classics of our tradition, on the one hand, and modern scientific popularizations, on the other hand. What we say will often be applicable to the reading of specialized monographs on abstruse and limited subjects, but we cannot help you to read those. There are two reasons for this. One is, simply, that we are not qualified to do it.

  The other is this. Until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience. Their authors—men like Galileo, and Newton, and Darwin—were not averse to being read by specialists in their fields; indeed, they wanted to reach such readers. But there was as yet no institutionalized specialization in those days, days which Albert Einstein called “the happy childhood of science.” Intelligent and well-read persons were expected to read scientific books as well as history and philosophy; there were no hard and fast distinctions, no boundaries that could not be crossed. There was also none of the disregard for the general or lay reader that is manifest in contemporary scienp. 256tific writing. Most modern scientists do not care what lay readers think, and so they do not even try to reach them.

  Today, science tends to be written by experts for experts. A serious communication on a scientific subject assumes so much specialized knowledge on the part of the reader that it usually cannot be read at all by anyone not learned in the field. There are obvious advantages to this approach, not least that it serves to advance science more quickly. Experts talking to each other about their expertise can arrive very quickly at the frontiers of it—they can see the problems at once and begin to try to solve them. But the cost is equally obvious. You—the ordinary intelligent reader whom we are addressing in this book—are left quite out of the picture.

  In fact, this situation, although it is more extreme in science than elsewhere, obtains in many other fields as well. Nowadays, philosophers seldom write for anyone except other philosophers; economists write for economists; and even historians are beginning to find that the kind of shorthand, monographic communication to other experts that has long been dominant in science is a more convenient way of getting ideas across than the more traditional narrative work written for everyone.

  What does the general reader do in these circumstances? He cannot become expert in all fields. He must fall back, therefore, on scientific popularizations. Some of these are good, and some are bad. But it is not only important to know the difference; it is also important to be able to read the good ones with understanding.

  Understanding the Scientific Enterprise

  One of the fastest growing academic disciplines is the history of science. We have seen marked changes in this area within the past few years. It was not so long ago that “serious” scientists looked down upon historians of science. The latter p. 257 were thought of as men who studied the history of a subject because they were not capable of expanding its frontiers. The attitude of scientists to histor
ians of science could be summed up in that famous remark of George Bernard Shaw’s: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”

  Expressions of this attitude are seldom heard nowadays. Departments of the history of science have become respectable, and excellent scientists study and write about the history of their subject. An example is what has been called the “Newton industry.” At the present time, intensive and extensive research is being undertaken in many countries on the work and strange personality of Sir Isaac Newton. Half a dozen books have been recently published or announced. The reason is that scientists are more concerned than ever before about the nature of the scientific enterprise itself.

  Thus we have no hesitation in recommending that you try to read at least some of the great scientific classics of our tradition. In fact, there is really no excuse for not trying to read them. None of them is impossibly difficult, not even a book like Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, if you are willing to make the effort.

  The most helpful advice we can give you is this. You are required by one of the rules for reading expository works to state, as clearly as you can, the problem that the author has tried to solve. This rule of analytical reading is relevant to all expository works, but it is particularly relevant to works in the fields of science and mathematics.