If you are like me, you have dozens of books, in piles, on shelves, in cupboards that are unread. The Japanese even have a word for this. Tsundoku means buying books and letting them pile up unread, or literally, ‘reading pile’.

I have decided that you, my friends, are going to benefit from my reading piles. I am going to read the books and share my impressions, key insights, when helpful summaries that will hopefully enlighten or at least entertain. Maybe the these book tastings with inspire you to have a full meal and read the full book yourself. For me the benefit will be creating a habit of daily reading with purpose, and the knowledge that as I write about the books, the knowledge I have gained will deepen and give me a more solid understanding of the content.

Which leads me to today’s book. “How to Read a Book - The classic guide to intelligent reading” by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren published originally in 1940 by M.J. Adler alone and revised and republished in 1972. It is an old book. 

Chances are you do already know how to read a book, you are reading this after all. But why do you read? You read for knowledge or understanding, and for entertainment. What you read is either expository, to gain information or knowledge or imaginative, to experience and feel something the author is trying to convey. While most of “How to Read a Book” speaks to expository reading it also has chapters on how to read imaginative literature, as well as stories, plays and poems.

The book teaches how to perform each of 4 levels of expository reading with the aim of encouraging us how to be more demanding readers, not just reading the words - elementary reading, but also inspectional reading, analytical reading and synoptical reading. A demanding reader asks 4 basic questions:

1. What is the book about as a whole?
2. What is being said, in detail and how, i.e. the main ideas, assertions and arguments of the author’s message?
3. Is the book true? In whole or in part?
4. What of it? What is the significance of the message? What follows? What’s next?

Inspectional reading answers the first two questions. The first is what many of us do in the bookstore, or on Amazon. We read the title, the cover notes, peruse the index, maybe the reviews and a few random passages. The question we are asking ourselves is ‘Is this book worth buying or reading?’ Adler and Doren suggest we continue inspectional reading when we get the book home to answer the second question. We do this by studying the table of contents and the index, skimming the first and last paragraphs of each chapter, and the last few pages of the book. For a very complex book, the final stage of inspectional reading is to read the book through superficially. This means not looking up words you don’t know and not rereading until you understand each section. The theory is it is better to understand half of the whole book than to give up after just a few chapters.

Before I get into analytical and synoptical reading it is important to understand that our educational systems tend to neglect developing reading skills, tending to drop off once students have developed vocabulary and are able to read in context, for different purposes. The mature stage of elementary reading entails the ability to compare and contrast and assimilate experiences, a level many do not reach.

Analytical reading is often not entirely mastered until late high school or even college. It answers the third question - Is the book true? There are 4 rules of analytical reading according to Adler and Van Doren:

1. You have to determine what kind of book you are reading. This aids in determining how you will approach the book.
2. Attempt to state the unity of the whole book in a single sentence.
3. Identify all the parts of the book. Are the parts akin to a pile of bricks or can they be ordered in such a way as to build a house? “The most readable book is an architectural achievement on the part of the author.” (p.77)
4. Determine the author’s intentions in terms of what problems was he/she trying to solve.

The greatest bulk of the book digs deep into the process of analytical reading, providing numerous approaches such as note taking, aids to reading and how to read various types of books including philosophy, science and mathematics, history, etc. There is just too much to go into here.

Finally, synoptical reading answers the questions - What of it? What is the significance of the message? What follows? What’s next? Synoptical reading is complex, systematic reading and comparing of many books and understanding more than is contained in the sum of all the books. If a Masters degree is the result of analytical reading, then synoptical reading is the Doctorate. Writer and human behavioural specialist Dr. John Demartini says the average doctorate entails reading 75 to 100 books on your topic. What you understand at the end of all that is the result of synoptical reading.

If you are intrigued by all of this, by all means buy a copy of this book and truly learn How to Read a Book.

Hope this was informative. Now let me get back to my reading. 

Dena Zavier