Book Ponder

• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren
• Pages: 426
• Rating: 5/5
• Read:  November 29, 2019 – May 24, 2020 | January 9, 2024 – January 27, 2024

If you are embarking on a journey to enhance your reading skills then “How to Read a Book” is the essential text. Rarely do people continue to improve their reading once it’s no longer mandatory. However, reading is an activity that we should engage in for the rest of our lives; it brings value to us in many ways and this book will take your reading skill to the next level. 

The 4 Levels of Reading

“How to Read a Book” teaches us about the 4 levels of reading and before we can dive into the lessons this book can teach us, we first need to learn what those levels are.

1. Elementary Reading
   1. Being able to read the words, the most basic form of reading.
2. Inspectional Reading
   1. Skimming systematically.
   2. Getting a general overview of the book.
   3. You should be able to answer, “What kind of book is it?”
3. Analytical Reading
   1. Chewing and digesting the book.
   2. Not necessary if only reading for information or entertainment.
4. Synoptical Reading
   1. Reading many books and placing them in relation to one another.
   2. The most rewarding kind of reading.

A higher level of reading cannot be reached without being able to do the previous levels of reading first.

Enlightenment

“If you remember what an author says, you have learned something from reading him. If what he says is true, you have even learned something about the world. But whether it is a fact about the book or a fact about the world that you have learned, you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

You don’t gain anything but an exercise in memory when you remember things from the books you read, once you begin to understand what point the author is trying to make and how he is making it, you begin to gain enlightenment from your reading.  Sometimes we must take a step back and ask ourselves, “What are we reading for?”  The most significant error a reader can commit is reading books solely to inflate their “read” count or to impress others.

Skim a Book Before Starting It

A new skill I learned from this book was to give an inspectional read (skimming) to anything new I am going to read.  I’ll read the back of the book, a preface if it contains one, the table of contents, and sometimes even the epilogue.  You will be surprised by how much more of the book you will understand when your mind is prepared for the material it is going to consume, non-fiction reading is the opposite of fiction reading, we want no surprises.

“Study the table of contents to obtain a general sense of the book’s structure; use it as you would a road map before taking a trip. It is astonishing how many people never even glance at a book’s table of contents unless they wish to look something up in it. In fact, many authors spend a considerable amount of time in creating the table of contents, and it is sad to think their efforts are often wasted.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

The Four Questions While Reading

The most important key concept I gained was to constantly be asking “The Four Questions” while reading regardless of what you are reading.  Some pieces of content may require different levels of reading, but the four questions should be asked on anything we read.  The four questions are:

1. What is the book about as a whole?
   1. You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes and topics.
2. What is being said in detail, and how?
   1. You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.
3. Is the book true, in whole or part?
   1. You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two.  You must know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not.  When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your mind.  Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.
4. What of it?
   1. If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance.  Why does the author think it is important to know these?

It seems like a lot to remember so I wrote them down on a sticky note that goes on the backside of my bookmark as a constant reminder of the questions I should be pondering while reading.  The book emphasizes the importance of not just knowing what the questions are but asking them while you read.

“Knowing what the four questions are is not enough. You must remember to ask them as you read. The habit of doing that is the mark of a demanding reader. More than that, you must know how to answer them precisely and accurately. The trained ability to do that is the art of reading.” 

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

Easy Tasks Tend to Be Addicting

“Most of us are addicted to non-active reading. The outstanding fault of the non-active or undemanding reader is his inattention to words, and his consequent failure to come to terms with the author.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

The reason why the world is shifting to short clips like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts is that all the hard work is done for us, and our attention spans are at an all-time low.  When we didn’t have access to something to always cure our boredom we would have to just be bored, and people didn’t realize that being bored is an actual skill that relates closely to being able to focus on one thing for long periods.  This translates to reading also, when people realize that reading is better than doom scrolling on their phones, they try to pick up a book but notice that having to work for satisfaction increases the desire for a quick distraction drastically.  Never is the urge stronger to check your phone than to a person who hasn’t focused on a singularly difficult task for a long period.  This is when the true power of how addicted we are to easy things is displayed.

Writing In Your Books

Ryan Holiday emphasizes that the highest respect any reader can pay him is by showing him a copy of his books that contains real wear and tear through multiple reads and extensive writing in the margins.   He much rather see this than an untouched copy of his book collecting dust on a bookshelf somewhere made to just be a decoration.  “How to Read a Book” also emphasizes the point that writing in a book creates full ownership of the book and is the highest form of respect for the author.

“Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.  Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

Books Are Absent Teachers

Our education doesn’t end when we are done with our schooling.  There will always be more learning to do in either our personal or professional lives and with technology evolving faster every day we will be left in the dust if we stop learning.  The only change is that after our schooling much of the learning will fall into our own hands which is a blessing in disguise.  We can study topics that interest us or increase our career capital, on our own schedule.  When teachers are absent from our lives books can take their place.  A good thought process I like to have is that whatever challenge, problem, or struggle you are facing, someone, someplace, at some point in time faced that same circumstance and succeeded.  Better yet, they wrote a book about it, and you can gain the knowledge it may have taken someone a lifetime to achieve, in a couple of hundred pages. 

“For those of us who are no longer in school, we observed, it is necessary, if we want to go on learning and discovering, to know how to make books teach us well. In that situation, if we want to go on learning, then we must know how to learn from books, which are absent teachers.” 

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

Shifting Levels of Reading

Each piece of content necessitates its own unique reading approach.  We don’t need a pen, highlighter, tabs, and a desk when reading a science fiction book.  When we are reading a difficult philosophy book that can change the way we look at the world, a different level of reading is needed.  Occasionally within the same book, different parts will require different levels of reading.

“Our intention here is not to lead you from reading to writing. It is rather to remind you that one approaches the ideal of good reading by applying the rules we have described in the reading of a single book, and not by trying to become superficially acquainted with a larger number. There are, of course, many books worth reading well. There is a much larger number that should be only inspected. To become well-read, in every sense of the word, one must know how to use whatever skill one possesses with discrimination—by reading every book according to its merits.” 

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

The skill to shift your levels of reading may take some time to master, but the more time you spend reading you will find yourself shifting between the different levels of reading naturally.  Your brain will automatically detect a part of a book that is important or resonates with you and slow down to digest it properly.  For parts of a book that do not relate to your interests or feel like fluff, you will notice your brain automatically shifting to skimming mode (inspectional reading).  This back-and-forth shifting of reading levels will help you move through non-important parts quickly and slow down on the parts you need to fully focus on. 

“We have stated the rules of analytical reading generally so that they apply to any expository book—any book that conveys knowledge, in the sense in which we have been using that term. But you cannot read a book in general. You read this book or that, and every particular book is of a particular sort. It may be a history or a book in mathematics, a political tract or a work in natural science, or a philosophical or theological treatise. Hence, you must have some flexibility and adaptability in following the rules. Fortunately, you will gradually get the feeling of how they work on different kinds of books as you apply them.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

When you are reading a book for a certain need then shifting your levels of reading while working through the book will speed up the process while only digesting the necessary parts of the text.  For example, if you are reading a parenting book on how to get your teenage son ready for high school sports, you would do an inspectional read over the parts that do not directly relate to you and give an analytical read to the sections containing advice on nutrition and exercises for middle school boys.  Reading for knowledge is different than reading a novel for entertainment because the goal is different.  We wouldn’t skip around and only skim parts of a novel because then we would lose our place and not understand the story correctly, but when you are reading a book as a tool, then use it in a way that adapts to your needs.

“Your aim is to find the passages in the books that are most germane to your needs. It is unlikely that the whole of any of the books is directly on the subject you have chosen or that is troubling you. Even if this is so, as it very rarely is, you should read the book quickly. You do not want to lose sight of the fact that you are reading it for an ulterior purpose—namely, for the light it may throw on your own problem—not for its own sake.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

How To Know If You Grasped the Book

Especially at the early levels of reading, we can finish a book and gain enjoyment or some advice from it, but only at the surface level.  If someone asked you what the book was about, it would be hard to put it into words, the book just “felt” like it was good, the experience was enjoyable but that’s a temporary feeling.  Especially a week or month later, you may have little to no memory of what the book was about. 

“It may be, of course, that people deceive themselves about their ability to read novels intelligently. From our teaching experience, we know how tongue-tied people become when asked to say what they liked about a novel. That they enjoyed it is perfectly clear to them, but they cannot give much of an account of their enjoyment or tell what the book contained that caused them pleasure. This might indicate that people can be good readers of fiction without being good critics. We suspect this is, at best, a half-truth. A critical reading of anything depends upon the fullness of one’s apprehension. Those who cannot say what they like about a novel probably have not read it below its most obvious surfaces.” 

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

If you can’t explain why, you enjoyed the book then you probably didn’t grasp it past the surface level.

A Book Is Just the Guide, You Must Act

One of the few downsides of reading and trying to attain knowledge, is that we become hoarders of information.  We read and read but for what reason if we do nothing with it?  The books are just the guide to do the thing, but if we never do the thing then what was the point?  At some point, we need to act and either implement the lessons we have gained from our reading into our lives or do the skills we are learning.   A good example is reading a book about playing guitar but never practicing on the guitar.  What was the point? 

“The most important thing to remember about any practical book is that it can never solve the practical problems with which it is concerned. A theoretical book can solve its own problems. But a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only by earning a living. Take this book, for example. It is a practical book. If your interest in it is practical (it might, of course, be only theoretical), you want to solve the problem of learning to read. You would not regard that problem as solved and done away with until you did learn. This book cannot solve the problem for you. It can only help. You must actually go through the activity of reading, not only this book but many others. That is what it means to say that nothing but action solves practical problems, and action occurs only in the world, not in books.” 

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

Challenge Yourself

Reading can be fun, but we must distinguish what we are reading for, if it’s for entertainment then read whatever you want, but if you are trying to become a better reader, you need to challenge yourself.  If you are a below-average reader this doesn’t mean jumping into the most difficult books, but we should be reading books that force us to slow down to occasionally reread a sentence or look up a word.  Reading challenging books isn’t a race and you should become accustomed to having to stop and think about what you are reading and digest the content, this is part of the growth process of becoming a great reader.

“If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.”

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

The Quake Books

One of my favorite terms I learned about five years ago is “Quake Books”, these are books that fundamentally shake you to your core in some way, perhaps they completely change the way you view the world or give you advice that changes your life.  Quake books never get old and give you something new every time you return to them, sometimes a book may feel like a quake book but after the second or third time around it stops giving, quake books never do this.  A good example of a quake book for me is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, I have read it once a year for the past five years and it has never failed to give me something new.  A book I believed was a quake book but gave me nothing new on the second read was Walden, not to say Walden isn’t an amazing book, and I gained plenty of value from it on my first read, I just didn’t gain anything new from it on my second time around.  When you find a quake book cherish it, revisit it when you need to, and share it with others.  “How to Read a Book” makes a great explanation of great books and quake books,

“If the book belongs to the second class of books to which we referred before, you find, on returning to it, that there was less there than you remembered. The reason, of course, is that you yourself have grown in the meantime. Your mind is fuller, your understanding greater. The book has not changed, but you have. Such a return is inevitably disappointing. But if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it—whole sets of new things—that you did not see before. Your previous understanding of the book is not invalidated (assuming that you read it well the first time).” 

(Adler & Van Doren, 1940)

Final Thoughts

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and highly recommend it to anyone interested in deepening their reading habits.  The benefit of reading has been proven repeatedly to be beneficial in keeping our brains healthy and engaged as we grow into old age.  Sometimes our bodies can’t keep up anymore but there is no limit to the amount of growth our brains can have and there is no better tool to keep it sharp and active than reading.  This book can feel overwhelming, and I remember my first read, analytical and synoptical reading seemed confusing and overly complex, but these are levels of reading that are achieved through years of reading, there’s no better time to start now. These steps and lessons taught in this book are valuable but seem to be overkill on certain books that’s why it’s important to implement shifting your levels in reading, depending on what the goal and book are.  If you are trying to learn something difficult then they can be handy, but for a biography or history book, I don’t think it requires all the same rules.  I read this book as an average reader at first and I gained a lot of knowledge from it, I returned to it last year as a more “advanced” reader and gained even more value than the first time.  I plan to revisit it once again in the future to see if it is a “quake” book or if I distilled all the knowledge I could from it.  Let me know if you plan on reading this book, or if you have, how it affected your reading life moving forward.

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