How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler

modified 20/04/2024 22:48

• main idea is that a book can be read on multiple levels; the higher you go, the more you’ll understand, but also the more time you’ll spend. then goes in depth about each level, how to reach it, tips & tricks…

• i kinda identify with the last sentence of the first paragraph, even more with the huge amount of information we’ve got do deal with in our times: “The viewer of television… is presented with a with a whole complex of elements… to make it easy for him to make up his own mind, with the minimum ammount of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener or reader does not make up his own mind at all… He has performed acceptably without having had to think”. I’ve noticed this about myself – that I rarely actually stop to think about the art I engage with, and rather just take the point of some “higher authority” and make it my own (i.e fantano, or movie critics, or other people’s reviews). I’ve started working on improving this.

• also, another interesting idea (kinda obvious, though, but i struggle with it) is using your imagination while reading. i’ve been assuming that my mind just imagines automatically, and never actually stopped to imagine, so i feel like i missed on a lot of stuff.

• skimming through a book (aka inspectional reading 1) should ideally be the first thing you do when you pick it up. i already knew most of the stuff about it (reading the TOC, preface, going to the most important chapters and reading a bit of that, reading few paragraphs of the other chapters here and there from the pretty famous study less, study smart video, and this video), but i still don’t do it every time with a new book. i guess i should start doing that more often.

  • <2023-02-23 Thu 21:19> UPDATE: tried this on a few books, and it seems i actually get a better grasp of the book as a whole. quite a neat technique.

• a more interesting point, however, is the idea of superficial reading (aka inspectional reading 2): if a book is over your head read it entirely, without worrying about the things you don’t understand, then come back to the stuff you didnt’ understand after finishing it. i think i’ll try this with SICP, as there were a lot of times i didn’t understand stuff, which made me think i’m dumb, and that i’m not ready for it (whatever ready means), which is why i stopped reading it. but i think there’s a lot of stuff to learn from SICP. as the author puts it, “understanding half of a difficult book is better than not understanding it at all”. i’ve read the experiences of a few people with SICP, and they seem to agree that they didn’t really understand anything on the first read, and that afte you’ve written some code and seen some bad code, you finally get around to understainding what it’s all about.

• i think the best way to read this book is to go chapter-by-chapter, note the steps, and then go try them out on some book. i’ve got to try this.

Analytical reading

from https://www.artofmanliness.com/living/reading/how-to-read-a-book/

1. read up on the author. find out about his life, other books and so on, to understand the context in which the book you’re reading has been written in
2. do a quick skimming: look at the toc, read the introduction, then go through the entire book quickly, just to get a general idea of how it’s structured, what’s the order of the chapters
3. read the book through, ignoring everything that you don’t understand. write down the stuff you don’t understand, but don’t actually stop to look into it; instead, keep reading, basically quantity over quality at this point. the important thing is to not get stuck on difficulties. understanding even 10% of a hard book is better than 0%.
4. after you finish, go back to the stuff you didn’t understand, and look into that. try re-reading the book, but slower this time, thinking through everything
5. answer these questions:
   1. what is the book about, as a whole; summarise book in a sentence.
   2. how it’s being said. try fragmenting; basically, what the book is about, but in more than a sentence
   3. is the book true? are the feelings true to human nature? is it fiction? and so on
   4. what’s the takeaway? how did this book make you be better? what did you learn from it?
6. ill try applying this system to some books that i read, and will come back and share my thoughts

Finding out what a book is about

• this should be the first thing we do when picking up a book; look at the TOC, think about the title (really think); look at the blurb, read the preface, motivations and so on as they generally explain what problem the author is trying to solve.
• classify the book: is it a practical book or theoretical book; fiction? non-fiction? is it a novel? a play?
• what is the book about? summarise in 1 sentence
• summarise in more than 1 sentence; what’s the structure? the important parts? in what order do the events happen? how do chapters progress? where do they start and end with?
• what problem is the author trying to solve?