How to Read a Book

How to Read a Book

Bibliography

• Author: Mortimer J Adler
• Full_Title: How to Read a Book
• Category: books
• Last Highlighted Date: 2023-03-08 01:43:56+00:00

Highlights

• The book consists of language written by someone for the sake of communicating something to you. Your success in reading is determined by the extent to which you get all that writer intended to communicate.
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• That is done in one way only. Without external help, you take the book into your study and work on it. With nothing but the power of your mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves.
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• There would appear to be several types of reding: for information, for entertainment, for understanding.
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• Let me summarize now the distinction between these two types of reading. We shall have to consider both because the line between what is readable in one way and what must be read in the other is often hazy. To whatever extent we can keep the two kinds of reading distinct, we can use the word “reading” in two distinct senses. The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else which, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase the store of information we remember, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity which comes form getting in over our depth—that is, if we were both alert and honest. The second sense is the one in which I would say a man has to read something that at first he does not completely understand. Here the thing to be read is initially better than the reader. The writer is communicating something which can increase the reader’s understanding.
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• The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else which, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase the
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• ONE rule of reading, as you have seen, is to pick out and interpret the important words in a book. There is another and closely related rule: to discover the important sentences and to understand what they mean.
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• To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same and different, and so forth.
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• Teaching, as we have seen, is the process whereby one man learns from another through communication. Instruction is thus distinguished from discovery, which is the process whereby a man learns something by himself, through observing and thinking about the world, and not by receiving communicatioin from other men.
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• A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.
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• I never tire of quoting John Dewy at them. He said long ago: “The discipline that is identical with trained power is also identical with freedom… Genuine freedom, in short, is intellectual; it rests in the trained power of thought.” A discipline mind, trained in the poer of thought, is one which can read and write critically, as well as do efficient work in discovery. The art of thinking, as we have seen, is the art of learning through being taught or through unaided research.
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• It is a well-known fact that those periods of European culture in which men were least skillful in reading and writing were periods in which the greatest hullabaloo was raided about eh unitelligibility of everything that had been written before. This is what happened in the decadent Hellenictic period and in the fifteenth century, and it is happening again today. When men are incompetent in reading and writing, their inadequacy seems to express itself in their being hypercritical about everybody else’s writing.
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• The most direct sign that you have done the work of reading is fatigue. Reading that is reading entails the most intense mental activity. It you are not tired out, you probably have not been doing the work. Far from being passive and relaxing, I have always found what litle reading I have done the most arduous and active occupation.
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• Not only should it tire you, but there should be some discernible product of your memtal activity. Thinking usually tends to express itself overtly in language. One tends to verbalize ideas, questions, difficulties, judgements that occur in the course of thinking. If you have been reading, you must have been thinking; you have something you can express in words. One of the reasons why I find reading a slow process is that I keep a record of the little thing I do. I cannot go on reading the next page, if I do not make a memo of something which occurred to me in reading this one.
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• Whatever procedure you choosem you can measure yourself as a reader by examining what you have produced in notes during the course of reading a book.
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• Types of Reading: I. For amusement II. For knowledge A. For information B. For understanging Types of Learning: I. By discovery: without teachers II. By instruction: through aid of teachers A. By live teachers: lectures; liestening B. By dead teachers: books; reading Hence Reading II (A and B) is Learning II (B) But books are also of different sorts: Types of Books: I. Digests and repetitions of other books II. Original communications And it appears that: Reading II(A) is related more closely to Books I Reading II(B) is related more closely to Books II
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