Name: How to Read a Book
Rating: 3.641025641025641 (78 reviews)
ISBN: 9781439510261

Mortimer Jerome Adler

Charles Lincoln Van Doren

Analyzes the art of reading and suggests ways to approach literary works

How to Read a Book

Parmin

On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball. Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different. If anything is passive, it is the ball. It is the inert thing that is put in motion or stopped, whereas the players are active, moving to pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect. The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process. We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitchfast balls and curves, change- ups and knucklers. Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible. 

Mortimer J. Adler

Charles Van Doren

With half a million copies in print, How to Read a Book is the best and most successful guide to reading comprehension for the general reader, completely rewritten and updated with new material. A CNN Book of the Week: “Explains not just why we should read books, but how we should read them. It's masterfully done.” –Farheed Zakaria Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them—from elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading. Readers will learn when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text. Also included is instruction in the different techniques that work best for reading particular genres, such as practical books, imaginative literature, plays, poetry, history, science and mathematics, philosophy and social science works. Finally, the authors offer a recommended reading list and supply reading tests you can use measure your own progress in reading skills, comprehension, and speed.

Greg Talbot

At 26, I don't feel a bit silly thumbing through "How to Read a Book", I think it's rock solid advice to anyone who wants to improve their reading skills. I imagine an audience in formative years or more established readers were learn a lot from a book like this. Goodreads readers, we probably read a lot, and quicky. The question we should be mindful of is if we are choosing to read wisely. If we take the perspective as Adler and Van Doren do, that reading is always a conversation, how well are we listening. Speed-reading and skimming through books is going to be healthy for the majority of our reading materials, but for more analytical reading or syntopical reading, it requires attentiveness to both the written and non-written words. Also, the chapters on critcizing a work was particularly illuminating to me. It challenges the reader if we fully understand the argument before we challenge it. And for most modern readers, it is atypical to keep that open-minded objective bias (as much as we humanly can) for subjects that we have strong personal feelings toward (theology, philosophy, politics). From reading word to word, or reading the Western philsophical cannon, "How to Read" is a great resource in your arsenal

If you wanna read more actively and analytically, this is the one. Practical and helpful.

A practical book arguing for analytical ways of reading and putting books, articles, plays, encyclopedias, Great Books™️, and more into context and how to come to terms with an author.

I found the section on how to mark and note the pages of a book to be useful.

Double Feature: "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" - Pierre Bayard

J Kadow

A practical book arguing for analytical ways of reading and putting books, articles, plays, encyclopedias, Great Books™️, and more into context and how to come to terms with an author.

I found the section on how to mark and note the pages of a book to be useful.

Double Feature: "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read" - Pierre Bayard

Yash

This is a must-have book for any and every avid readers. Excellent and detailed piece on how-tos with any reading materials, not just books. It is a worthwhile investment for any book-readers to go back to once in a while. It made me survive med-school and yet, I still go back to it every time. Highly recommended.

Yeung Man Lung

this book is a very good read. It explicitly tells the reader that the book requires the readers to have a basic reading level and it aims to improve the reading efficiency of readers. Indeed the book is helpful. The skimming part of the inspectional reading is especially helpful to the person who is spending time overthinking parts that should not be worth the time. If you know the skills, you can quickly grab 50-60% of the essence of the books by using 10% of the usual reading time. 

I am also a quick reader and quick learner so I would say I kind of apply the skills to the book while I was reading this book. I found this book spends too much effort explaining why some steps or reading practices are important while those explanations are unnecessary in my point of view. People who understand the importance of the practices will understand. Therefore I read the book really fast.

Nelson Zagalo

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading é um livro de 1940, pertence a um mundo no qual não existia internet e em que a partilha deste tipo de informação funcionava melhor no formato de livro. O conteúdo do livro acaba tratando muito daquilo que ensinamos aos nossos alunos de mestrado e doutoramento, algo que hoje fazemos melhor por via de aulas e artigos curtos. Ou seja, ensina a ler profissionalmente e não por prazer, deste modo a generalidade do que aqui é dito destina-se à leitura de não-ficção, e apenas a Literatura no caso de quem a trabalha de modo analítico, e não por mero prazer. Assim, resenho aqui o livro no sentido de divulgar e servir aqueles que usam os livros e seus conteúdos com caráter académico e/ou profissional.

...
continua no blog, em: https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

Kuba Milcarz

Wow that was packed with so many detail and technical aspects. But generally speaking it helped me organize the way I read books. I’ll be taking notes soon, but for sure analytical reading will stay with me. Even if I only use it to skim through books to get an idea whether it is worth it to read the whole thing.

Miriam Bauer

Very insightful. I'm confident it will be useful to me, as someone who is still rather new to university. 
One thing though: The author claims that, ideally, you should read a book in one sitting for ultimate understanding. However, this book definitely doesn't make this an easy task: it is rather wordy and often needlessly overly-academical.
Still, thanks to this book I feel very motivated right now to read something that is "over my head" and expand my mind.

Ivaylo Durmonski

Needing a book on how to read a book might sound absurd, I know. Yet, after taking the time to immerse myself in the work by Charles Van Doren & Mortimer J. Adler, I understand why this book had to be written.

The general population still believes that reading is a passive activity that should be performed mainly to relax your brain. But that’s not the case if you want to learn something from a written text.

How to Read a Book perfectly outlines the importance of reading. Why you should read to understand, not only to gain new information. And more importantly, how to take notes, use the text, and morph it into an actionable spreadsheet full of future steps that you need to take in order to improve your existence.

If you’re a vivid reader but your life, outside of the realms of pages full of important information remains unchanged, get this book. It will show you how to use books to make improvements in your life, not merely to gain more “life-changing” insights.

Practical lessons are present around every corner of the pages written by Charles Van Doren & Mortimer J. Adler. Yes, you can get lost here and there because the book was first published in 1930, meaning that some passages are quite formal-sounding, but the overall reading experience can be a real game-changer.

This book will teach you how to spot the critical parts in any text so you can act on them.

My key takeaway is this:

Ask questions while you go through any text. Reading shouldn’t be a passive activity. It should be like a conversation. You question the arguments laid down by the author and answer them to better understand what was said.

Full summary:
https://durmonski.com/book-summaries/...

Christine Liu

I love to read (obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this) and I got my bachelor's degree in English Lit, so I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on how to read critically. Still, I found this book very insightful and got a lot out of it in terms of breaking down how to actively engage with any written work.

There's a difference between reading solely for entertainment and reading as an intellectual pursuit, and there's a further difference between reading to gain information and reading to gain understanding. The main point here is that reading is a pretty complex activity if you're doing it right, and it's meant to be active. Active reading (and along with it, learning) happens when you puzzle through your comprehension of what an author is trying to communicate. You go from a state of understanding less to a state of understanding more.

This book details the components of actively engaging with a book as a reader by breaking it up into four stages or types of reading. Elementary reading is the basic grammatical comprehension needed to read a book. Inspectional reading is getting an initial lay of the structure of what you're reading (what kind of book it is and what it's about as a whole). Analytical reading involves a conceptual deep dive into the book, asking and answering questions about the themes and their significance. And the final and most complex stage is syntopical reading, which is comparing and connecting different books about a common topic. As you read, you should get into the habit of asking yourself questions about how the author develops the main ideas that make up the theme of the book, and why it is significant to understand.

I enjoyed this book for the most part and found it an interesting and valuable resource, although I felt that the bulk of it is weighed down by the author's multiple layers of rules and overly long explanations of each of these rules. But I like the idea of approaching books according to process outlined here. My major takeaway is that I'll probably start reading more physical books so that I can take notes and also skim through and refer back to previous sections more easily.

Hugo Ahlberg

I found some chapters to be way too long and "in the weeds", but there are some really great gems in here which made me think differently about the various kinds of reading.. but it's wrapped in a rather dry and academic writing, so just a heads up. Also this book was written in 1940, while still very much applicable it obviously don't deal with how and what must of us read today — ebook and internet articles.

Palash Karia

Disclaimer: I skimmed through parts of this
Verdict: Should've read it (atleasted 'skimmed' it) sooner

My aim with reading this was to improve my reading habits in general, and specifically to read more about fiction.
Major takeaway for non-fiction
 - Figure out why you are reading - entertainment, information, or to develop understanding 
 – for fiction, what the book offers could be more than this

I read this in detail till the 'analytical' section rules, and then skimmed till chap 14 - which covers fiction.

I think Chapter 14, and the sections on epics, poetry & fiction, are some of the best parts of this book, although it can get a little difficult to understand at first. I had to come back to it & re-read a few times before everything really started falling into place. 

The reason why we read fiction, the reason why fiction even exists, the needs it satisfies – they were lost on me before.
I had practically never read much beyond Harry Potter – which was a familiar world, but the only one I knew. The examples evoked here do their job well. I'm now reading fiction, with an open mind, as this book suggests. I can't know what a book will offer, but it could be worth it. And there's only one way to find out.

How to Read a Book

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