How To Read A Book

How To Read A Book is a 1940 classic teaching you how to become a more active reader and deliberately practice the various stages of reading, in order to maximize the value you get from books.

Most people want to save time on books by learning how to speed read. I always tell them not to. To be okay with reading slowly. The one thing I’ve learned about saving time on books is that it doesn’t happen while reading. Where you save time is in deciding what you’ll read in the first place.

Sadly, a lot of non-fiction books don’t really warrant being read from cover to cover, and this is where what Mortimer J. Adler calls inspectional reading comes in.

The goal of an inspectional read is to answer two questions:

What is this book about? What kind of book is this?

You can do this by skim-reading the following sections:

The title page. The editor’s blurb. The cover text. The table of contents. Introductory sections and important paragraphs of chapters that interest you.

After you’ve done that, you’ll have a pretty good idea of whether this book deserves your full attention. If you do decide to read it cover to cover, read it entirely, but don’t look up things you don’t understand. This is what slows you down and makes a book painful to get through. Even without understanding everything, knowing what the entirety of the text is about will help you dig deeper into these things later.

This is where analytical reading comes in. Once you’ve read the book, you can really analyze it. This is where taking notes, highlighting, summarizing and thinking long and hard about the content become your tools of the trade. First, you should answer this question: “What was the author’s aim when he or she decided to write a book with this title?” Looking at the title will not only make it dead-simple for you to categorize the book, for example into maths, history, how-to or self-help, but remembering the main goal of the book will later help you connect complex ideas back to the overarching theme. Then, you can go on to unravel the book’s main theme, by trying to summarize its content in a few sentences and writing down all the different themes and sub-plots. It’ll help a lot to create a mindmap of how those relate to each other, so you can see how the various parts of the book relate to each other and the whole. For example, A Christmas Carol is set in five staves. You could summarize it briefly by saying first, Scrooge is visited by the ghost of his former business partner and warned about…