How well do you read books? In “How to Read a Book“, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren state their belief that most people do not read books beyond a grammar school proficiency level. However, the goal of their book is to increase your skill in reading and, by doing so, enable you to read great books for understanding instead of merely for information. What is the difference between understanding and information? According to Adler and van Doren:
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, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
Adler and van Doren posit that there are four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical, and syntopical. Elementary reading is the reading skill that children are taught in grammar school and that gives us the basics of reading for information and pleasure. To be sure, having a high percentage of the population literate in this sense is a great accomplishment. This allows a large portion of the population to gather information from reading books. However, the first level of reading can only take you so far.
Inspectional reading is meant to give you an overview of a book, of both its structure and its contents. Inspectional reading can be thought of as pre-reading a book, in preperation to reading a book analytically. Additionally, inspectional reading plays an important role in helping you determine which books are worth reading analytically; this is helpful in preparing to undertake a syntopic understanding of a subject.
Analytical reading is meant to increase you understanding through a thorough reading of the book. Adler and van Doren state that there are four questions you must ask and, through analytical reading, answer about a book:
- What is the book about as a whole?
- What is being said in detail, and how?
- Is the book true, in whole or in part?
- What of it?
If you can answer these questions about a book, you have done your job as an intelligent reader and increased your understanding by learning what the book had to teach you. Adler and van Doren provide a thorough set of rules that will enable you to learn to read analytically.
Syntopical reading goes a step further than analytical reading; syntopical reading acknowledges that any one book is not likely to contain the complete story and that a survey of several books may be needed to fully understand the subject matter. To that end, Adler and van Doren lay out a process through which you may combine the skills of inspectional and analytical reading to find and understand the relevant books to your chosen subject.
So, what of it? Does “How to Read a Book” accomplish its purpose? I believe that it does. Since reading it, I have begun to actively read the books that I am consuming so that I may come to an understanding with the authors instead of being a passive participant in the conversation.
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We are a not-for-profit educational organization, founded by Mortimer Adler and we have recently made an exciting discovery–three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren made a series of thirteen 14-minute videos, lively discussing the art of reading. The videos were produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For reasons unknown, sometime after their original publication, these videos were lost.
Three hours with Mortimer Adler on one DVD. A must for libraries and classroom teaching the art of reading.
I cannot over exaggerate how instructive these programs are–we are so sure that you will agree, if you are not completely satisfied, we will refund your donation.
Please go here to see a clip and learn more:
http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm
This is so meta, it hurts.
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