There is a book close to my heart because it dawned on me how below average one can act. In my search for being less stupid, I read “How to read a book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren (edition 1972)”. Let’s call this book HRB.

Notes:

This is a practical How-to book that explains how to read better if our goal is lifting our mind from understanding less to understanding more, to knowing more about life, the world, and ourselves. “Know thyself” someone said.

Entertainment and facts gathering was all that I was doing while reading since my childhood until now, instead of reading. There is nothing wrong with reading for amusement, but I was not lifting myself as much as I could “from understanding less to understanding more”.

For this purpose, we must choose books that are above our head (specially those kinds of books). Books that we would read over and over and each time learn something new. These books are different for each person. It’s not so important to read widely, but to read a few books deeply is paramount.

The framework proposed in this book divides reading in several levels: elementary, inspectional, analytical and syntopical.

The elementary reading is the one we learn at school where we can understand the words in the paper.

A quick improvement is to do inspectional reading. With this approach:

  1. Check the title, the cover, the preface, the intro and/or the prologue.
  2. Then, study the table of contents. Check the index. Check the publisher’s blurb.
  3. From the knowledge we gain from these checks, we choose the chapters that look pivotal. If these chapters contain summaries read them.
  4. Now, peruse around the different chapters stopping here and there and reading a few sentences that catch our attention. The authors recommend to check the last 2 or 3 paragraphs of each chapter because authors tend to summarize their main points at the end of chapters.
  5. Then check the conclusion and/or epilogue. Do this process in 20 to 40 minutes, at most 60 minutes.

Of course, we would not apply this approach to novels or stories, completely. We would not want to spoil ourselves the fun of the discovering the end. But, we can still apply the other parts of the inspectional reading.

We can now answer what type of book it is:

  1. Practical/how-to or theoretical,
  2. On philosophy, science, math, novel, poetry, reference.

Furthermore, we can decide if we want to read it at all. This is one of the points that most called my attention. We can decide after this inspection that we won’t continue to read the book at all.

Once we have decided that we want to continue, we will do a superficial reading. That is, we will read quickly from start to finish without stopping en parts we do not understand. We will let the job of understanding these parts for second reading. For now, we will take notes of passages that have called our attention y mark those parts that we want to come back to later. Let’s not stop because we do not understand a specific word.

Now, we can apply the analytical reading. We need to ask these 4 questions to the book:

  1. What is the book about as whole?
  2. What is being said in detail and how?
  3. Is the book true, in whole or in part?
  4. What of it?

In analytical reading we find the terms, or main words and their interpretation. Furthermore, one should come to terms with the author and that means to agree on how a term will be used. Only then, we could go about agreeing or disagreeing with an author, when we use his words in the way that he or she meant them.

In the same vein, we need to find the propositions and arguments of a text and come to terms with those. Once we have done that we could go about criticizing the book. For this latter purpose, we must follow the critics etiquette, as in we shall use the words in the way the book’s author intended, as much as possible. We must not agree or disagree without understanding first, the author’s terms, propositions, and arguments.

The last type of reading is the syntopical reading. Also, it can be called comparative or parallel reading. This is when we do analytical reading of several books about one topic and compare and even create new information based on those books that none of them contain. This is what people do, or should do, when they are doing a thesis in university.

Reading in this way is an active undertaking. One must do it with pen and paper in hand, so that we can answer the 4 questions. HRB uses the baseball pitcher-catcher, writer-reader analogy. The pitcher is throwing the ball, and the catcher must be just as active to catch the ball, properly. The writer is sending messages with his terms, propositions and arguments and the reader must be just as active to catch them.