How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler

Summary

The classic book on becoming a better reader that could’ve been half as long. The system Adler outlines to “read better” works best with non-fiction. This book changed my reading list: I no longer read books written in the last 5-10 years.

Key Takeaways

To be added on a reread. See notes below.

What I got out of it

This review provides a great overview.

Summary Notes

The Activity of Reading

To the Average Reader

Knowing how to read a book well was like any other art or skill. There were rules to learn and to follow. Through practice good habits must be formed. There were no insurmountable difficulties about it. Only willingness to learn and patience in the process were required.

For every illusion that the classroom can nourish, there is a school of hard knocks to destroy it. A few years of practice awaken the lawyer and the doctor. Business or newspaper work disillusions the boy who thought he was a trader or a reporter when he finished the school of commerce or journalism. Well, I thought I was liberally educated, that I knew how to read, and had read a lot. The cure for that was teaching, and the punishment that precisely fitted my crime was to having to teach, the year after I graduated, in this very Honors course which had so inflated me.

As time went on, I found out not only that I did not know very much about any of these books, but also that I did not know how to read them very well. To make up for my ignorance and incompetence I did what any young teacher might do who was afraid of both his students and his job. I used secondary sources, encyclopedias, commentaries, all sorts of books about books about these books. In that way, I thought, I would appear to know more than the students. They wouldn’t be able to tell that my questions or points did not come from my better reading of the book they too were working on.

Fortunately for me I was found out, or else I might have been satisfied with getting by as a teaching just as I had got by as a student. If I had succeeded in fooling others, I might soon have deceived myself as well.

Each book was a large world, infinitely rich for exploration, and woe to the student who answered questions as if, instead of traveling therein, he had been listening to a travelogue.

In the course of years, I think I have gradually learned to read a little better.

There is no longer any danger of self-deception, of supposing that I have become expert.

Why? Because reading the same books year after year, I discover each time what I found out the first year I began to teach: the book I am rereading is almost new to me.

For a while, each time I reread it, that I had really read it well at last, only to have the next reading show up my inadequacies and misinterpretations. After this happens several times, even the dullest of us is likely to learn that perfect reading lies at the end of the rainbow. Although practice makes perfect, in this art of reading as in any other, the long run needed to prove the maxim is longer than the allotted span.

After all, it takes time and trouble to grow up from the cradle, to make a fortune, raise a family, or gain the wisdom that some old men have. Why should it not take time and trouble to learn to read and to read what is worth reading?

No matter whether the reading is to learn or to earn, it can be done poorly or well.

My chief advantage is the clarity with which I know that I cannot, and perhaps why I cannot. That is the best fruit of years of experience in trying to teach others.

There is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do.

When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication;

they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences.They may even take the punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.

The Reading of “Reading”

Reading is better or worse according as it is more or less active.

Given the same thing to read, one man reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more successfully.

Your success in reading is determined by the extent to which you get all that writer intended to communicate.

Thus I roughly defined what I meant by reading: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The operations which cause this to happen are the various acts which constitute the art of reading.

Reading is Learning

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.

Most of us are acquainted with this distinction in terms of the difference between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.

Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on the one who learns. It would be a great mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive.

There is no passive leraning, as there is no complete passive reading.

There is no particular virtue, it seems to me, in wasting time to fine out for yourself what has already been discovered. One should save one’s skill in research for what has not yet been discovered, and exercise one’s skill in being taught for learning what others already know and therefore can teach.

Teachers, Dead or Alive

Our ultimate goal is understanding rather than information, though information is a necessary steppingstone. Hence we must go to the primary teachers, for they have understanding to give.

You may think there are many books, other than the great ones, which are worth reading. I agree, of couse. But you must admit in turn that the better the book, the more it is worth reading. Furthermore, if you learn how to read the great books, you will have no difficulty in reading other books, or for that matter anything else. You can use your skill to go after easier game. May I remind you, however, that the sportsman doesn’t hunt lame ducks?

The Defeat of the Schools

The doctors who fix your feet, prescribe your glasses, corect your posture, and relieve your emotional tensions cannot make you into a tennis player, though they transform you from a person who cannot learn how to one who can. Similarly, the psychologists who diagnose your reading disabilities and presecribe their cure do not know how to make you a good reader.

The normal individual has to be trained. He is gifted whth the power to learn, but he is not born with the art. That must be cultivated. The cure of abnormality may overcome the inequalities of birth or the accidents of early development. Even if it succeeded in making all men approximately equal in their initial capacity to learn, it could go no further. At that point, the development of skill would have to begin. Genuine instructioin in the art of reading begins, in short, where the educational psychologists leave off.

The sounder view of education, it seems to me, is one which emphasizes discipline. In this view, what one gets in school is not so much learning as the technique of learning, the arts of educating oneself through all the media the environment affords. Institutions educate only if they enable one to continue learning forever after. The art of reading and the technique of research are the primary instruments of learning, of being taught thnings and of finding them out. That is why they must be primary objectives of a sound educational system.

Knowledge and skill of mind are not the most important items in this life. Loving the right things is more important.

When men are incompetent in reading and writing, their inadequacy seems to express itself in their being hypercritical about everybody else’s writing.

There is only one college that I know of in this country which is trying to turn out liberal artists in the true sense. That is St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. There they recognize that four years must be spent in training students how to read, write, and reckon, and how to observe in a laboratory, at the same time that they are reading the great books in all fields. There they realize that there is no point trying to read the books without developing all the arts needed to read them, and likewise that it is impossible to cultivate these basic intellectual skills without at the samt time giving the right matter toexercise them on.

To be saved, we must follow the precept of the Book Common Prayer: “Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.”

On Self-Help

There is no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating. That is what it means to say one learns to do by doing. The difference between your activity before and after you have formed a habit is a difference in facility and readiness. You can do the same thing much better than when you started. That is what it meants to say practice makes perfect. What you do very imperfectly at first you gradually come to do with the kind of almost automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were to the manner born, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is the second nature.

One thing is clear. Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit. When we speak of a man as skilled in any way, we do not mean that he knows the rules of doing something, but that he possesses the habit of doing it.

An operation which is at first clumsy, disconnected, tedious, and painful becomes graceful and smooth, facile and pleasant, only through many hours of practice. If at first you do not succeed, the rewards of practice should induce you try again. Mr. Aaron Copland recently wrote a book on What to Listen for in Music. In its opening paragraph, he wrote:

All books on understanding music are agreed about one point: You can’t develop a better appreciation of the art merely by reading a book about it. If you want to understand music better, you can do nothing more important than listen to it. Nothing can possibily take the place of listening to music. Everything that I have to say in this book is said about an experience that you can only get outside this book.

Therefore, you will probably be wasting your time in reading it unless you make a firm resolve to hear a great deal more music than you have in the past. All of us, professionals and nonprofessionals, are forever trying to deepen our understanding of the art. Rreading a book may sometimes help us. But nothing can replace the prime consideration—listen to music itself.

What are the signs which indicate that I am making progress toward reading more intelligently?

There are many ways of answering such questions. For one thing, you should be able to tell whether you are getting the lift which comes from managing to understanding something which at first seemed unintelligible to you. For another, if you know the rules, you can always check your readings as one checks back on the sum of a column of figures. How many of the steps, which the rules prescribe, have you taken? You can measure your achievement in terms of the techniques you should have used to operate upon a book better than yourself, whereby to elevate yourself to its level.

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.

The business of making notes while reading is so important that you should not be deterred from writing in a book by the possible social consequences.

Types of Reading:

For amusement
For knowledge
1. For information
2. For understanding

Types of Learning:

By discovery: without teachers
By instruction: through aid of teachers
1. By live teachers: lectures; listening
2. By dead teachers: books; reading

Hence Reading II (A and B) is Learning II (B)

The Rules

From Many Rules to One Habit

They are three ways of reading a book. To be well read, each book should be read in these three ways each time it is read. The number of distinct times you can read something profitably depends partly on the book and prtly on you as a reader, your resourcefulness and industry.

Only at the beginning, I repeat, the three ways of reading a book must be done separately. Before you become expert, you cannot coalesce a lot of different acts into one complex, harmonious performance. You cannot telescope the different parts of the job so that they run into one another and fuse intimately. Each deserves your full atttention while you are doing it. After you have practice the parts seprately, you not only can do each with greater facility and less attention but you can also gradually put them toether into a smoothly running whole.

In the first place, you must be able to grasp what is being offered as knowledge. In the second place, you must judge whether what is being offered is really acceptable to you as knowledge. In the other words, there is first the task of understanding the book, and second the job of criticizing it. These two are quite separate, as you will see more and more.

The process of understanding can be further divided. To understand a book, you must approach it, first, as a whole, having a unity and a structure of parts; and, second, in terms of its elements, its units of language and thought.

There are three distinct readings, which can be rariously named and described as follows:

I. The first reading can be called structural or analytic. Here the reader proceeds from the whole to its parts.

II. The second reading can be called interpretative or synthetic. Here the reader proceeds from the parts to the whole.

III. The third reading can be called critical or evaluative. Here the reader judges the author, and decides whether he agrees or disagrees.

To accomplish the first reading you must know (1) what kind of book it is; that is, the subject matter it is about. You must also know (2) what the book as a whole is trying to say; (3) into what parts that whole is divided, and (4) what the main problems are that the author is trying to solve.

The greatest books most frequently combine these two basic dimensions of literature. A Platonic dialogue such as The Republic must be read both as a drama and as an intellectual discourse. A poem such as Dante’s The Diving Comedy is not only a magnificent story but a philosophical disquisition. Knowledge cannot be conveyed without the supporting texture of imagination and sentiment; and feeling and imagery are inveterately infected with thought.

And Still More Rules

Resent all the rules in a single table, each written in the form of a simple prescription.

The Analysis of a Book’s Structure
1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.
2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.
3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and analyze these parts as you have analyzed the whole.
4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.
The Interpretation of a Book’s Contents
1. Come to terms with the author by interpreting his basic words.
2. Grasp the author’s leading propositions through dealing with his most important sentences.
3. Know the author’s arguments, by finding them in, or constructing them out of, sequences of sentences.
4. Determine which of his problems the author solved, and which he did not; and of the latter, decide which the author knew he failed to solve.
The Criticism of a Book as a Communication of Knowledge
1. General Maxims
  1. Do not begin criticism until you have completed analysis and interpretation. (Do not .”• say you agree, disagree, or suspend judgment, until you can say, “I understand.”)
  2. Do not disagree disputatiously or contentiously.
  3. Respect the difference between knowledge and opinion, by having reasons for any critical judgment you make.
2. Specific Criteria tor Points of Criticism
  1. Show wherein the author is uninformed.
  2. Show wherein the author is misinformed.
  3. Show wherein the author is illogical.
  4. Show wherein the author’s analysis or account is incomplete.
  5. Note: Of these, the first three are criteria for disagreement. Failing in all of these, you must agree, in part at least, though you may suspend judgment on the whole, in the light of the fourth point.

The two major questions you must ask yourself in reading any sort of practical book. The first is: What are the author’s objectives? The second is: What means is he proposing?

Of all theoretical books, a history is most like practical books in this respect. Therefore, the advice to a reader is the same. Find out something about the character of the historian, and the local conditions which may have motivated him. Facts of this sort will not only explain his bias but prepare you for the moral lessons he tells you history teaches.

You must remember that an article of faith is not something which the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

A brief summary of the extrinsic aids to reading. What lies beyond the book you are reading? Three things, it seems to me, which are especially relevant: experience—common or special; other books; and live discussion.

To get into this conversation, we must read the great books in relation to one another, and in an order that somehow respects chronology. The conversation of the books takes place in time. Time is of the essence here and should not be disregarded. The books can be read from the present into the past or from the past into the present., Though I think the order from past to present has certain advantages, through being more natural, the fact of chronology can be observed in either way.

The Rest of the Reader’s Life

The Other Half

I have emphasized these various differences in order to state a few negative rules. They do not tell you how to read fiction. They tell you merely what not to do, because fiction is different from science. All of these “don’ts” boil down to one simple insight: don’t read fiction as it it were fact; don’t read a novel as if it were a scientific work, not even as if it were social science or psychology. This one insight is variously expanded by the following rules.

Don’t try to find a “message” in a novel, play, or poem
Don’t look for terms, propositions, and arguments in imaginative literature.
Don’t criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistency which properly apply to communications of ~ knowledge.
Don’t read all imaginative books as if they were the same

The interpretive reading of lyric poetry is a special problem which I have neither the competence nor the space to discuss. I have already mentioned (in Chapter Seven) some books which may be helpful in this connection. To those I might add the following:

Wordsworth’s preface to the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, Matthew Arnold’s Essays in Criticism, Edgar Allan Poe’s essays on The Poetic Principle and The Philosophy of Composition, T. S. Eliot’s work on The Use of Poetry, Herbert Read’s Form in Modern Poetry, and Mark Van Doren’s preface to An Anthology of English and American Poetry.

While I am recommending books, perhaps I should also mention a few that may help you develop your analytical powers in reading novels: Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Edwin Muir’s The Structure of the Novel, and Henry James’s prefaces collected under the title The Art of the Novel. For the reading of drama, nothing has replaced Aristotle’s analysis of tragedy and comedy in the Poetics. Where it needs to be supplemented for modern departures in the art of the theater, such books as George Meredith’s essay On Comedy and Bernard Shaw’s The (Quintessence of Ibsenism can be consulted.

The four questions I shall now state as guides tor reading anything apply equally to material which can inform us or enlighten us. To use these questions intelligently as a set of directions, you must know, of course, what it is you are after—whether you are reading for one purpose or the other. If you are wise, your purpose will accord properly with the nature of the thing to be read. Here are the four questions, with brief comment:

What in general is being said?
How in particular is it being said?
Is it true?
What of it?

These four questions summarize all the obligations of a reader. The first three indicate, moreover, why there are three ways of reading anything.

For the same reason, reading good books, or better, the great books, is the recipe for those who would learn to read. It is not that the rigors of difficult reading are the punishment which fits the crime of sloppy habits; rather, from the point of view of therapy, books which cannot be understood at all unless they are read actively are the ideal prescription for anyone who is still a victim of passive reading. Nor do I think that this medicine is like those drastic and strenuous remedies which are calculated either to kill or cure the patient. For in this case, the patient can determine the dosage. He can increase the amount of exercise he takes in easy stages. The remedy will begin to work as soon as he begins ind the more it works, the more he can take.

The Great Books

What a great book is.

I used to say jocularly that the great books were those everybody recommends and nobody reads, or those everyone says he intends to read and never does. In fact, the great books are probably the most widely read. They are not best sellers for a year or two. They are enduring best sellers.
The great books are popular, not pedantic. They are not written by specialists about specialties for specialists. Whether they be philosophy or science, or history or poetry, they treat of human, not academic, problems. They are written for men, not professors. When I say they are popular, I do not mean they are popularizations in the sense of simplifying what can be found in other books. I mean they were initially written for a popular audience. They were intended for beginners.
The great books are always contemporary. In contrast, the books we call “contemporary,” because they are currently popular, last only for a year or two, or ten at the most. They soon become antiquated. You probably cannot recall the names of the best sellers of the fifties. If they were recalled for you, you probably would not be interested in reading them. Especially in the field of nonfiction books, you want the latest “contemporary” product. But the great books are never outmoded by the movement of thought or the shitting winds of doctrine and opinion. On the contrary, one great book tends to intensify the significance of others about the same subject.
The great books are the most readable. I have said this before. It means several things. If the rules of skilled reading are somehow related to the rules of skillful writing, then these are the best-written books. If a good reader is proficient in the liberal arts, how much more so is a great writer a master of them! These books are masterpieces of liberal art. In saying this, I refer primarily to expository works. The greatest works of poetry or fiction are masterpieces of fine art. In both cases, language is mastered by the writer for the sake of the reader, whether the end be instruction or delight.
1. They have more ideas per page than most books have in their entirety. That is why you can read a great book over and over again and never exhaust its contents, and probably never read skillfully enough to master it completely. The most readable books are infinitely readable.
2. They are rereadable for another reason. They can be read at many different levels of understanding, as well as with a great diversity of interpretation.
I have also said before that the great books are the most instructive, the most enlightening. This follows, in a sense, from the tact that they are original communications, that they contain what cannot be found in other books.
Finally, the great books deal with the persistently unsolved problems of human life. It is not enough to say of them that they have solved important problems, in whole or in part—that is only one aspect of their achievement. There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Inquiry not only begins with wonder, but usually ends with it also.

The great books are the most readable tor anyone who knows how to read. Skill in reading is the only condition for entry into this good company.

Free Minds and Free Men

I have recommended discussion as an aid to reading, not reading for the sake of “brilliant” conversation. The conversation between reader and author, which is an integral part of good reading, may not take place unless the reader is accustomed to the discussion of books.

Reading the great books well is not an end in itself. It is a means toward living a decent human life, the life of a free man and a free citizen. This should be our ultimate objective.

You can proceed in the most democratic fashion by electing a leader for each meeting.

Let different people take turns at it. On each occasion the leader will probably leam more about reading and discussing the book than all the others. If every member of the group gets this experience in turn, the whole group will leam more quickly than if they imported a leader from the outside.

I do not have to tell you how a book should be discussed. All the rules for reading tell you that. They are a set of directions for discussing a book as well as reading it. Just as they should regulate the conversation you have with the author, so they govern the conversation you can have with your friends about the book. And, as I have said before, the two conversations mutually support each other.

A discussion is led by the asking of questions. The rules for reading indicate the major questions which can be asked about any book, in itself or in relation to other books. The discussion is sustained by the answering of questions. Those who participate must, of course, understand the questions and be relevant in the remarks they make. But if you have acquired the discipline of coming to terms with an author, you and your friends should have no difficulty in coming to terms with each other. In fact, it is easier, because you can help one another reach an understanding.

Good discussion of important problems in the light of great books is almost a complete exercise in the arts of thinking and communicating. Only writing is left out. Bacon said:

“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.”

Those who can read well, listen and talk well, have disciplined minds. Discipline is indispensable for a free use of our powers.

The arts of reading and writing, listening and speaking, are the arts which make it possible for us to think freely, because they discipline the mind. They are the liberating arts. The discipline they accomplish frees us from the vagaries of unfounded opinion and the strictures of local prejudice.

They free our minds from every domination except the authority of reason itself.

We must act, however. That is the final word in every phase of human life. I have not hesitated to praise the reading and discussion of great books as things intrinsically good, but I repeat: they are not the ultimate ends of life. We want happiness and a good society. In this larger view, reading is only a means to an end.

Mind Map

Book List