How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

by Mortimer J. Adler

  It is the same with reading. Probably you have been reading for a long time, too, and starting to learn all over again can be humiliating. But it is just as true of reading as it is of skiing that you cannot coalesce a lot of different acts into one complex, harmonious performance until you become expert at each of them. You cannot telescope the different parts of the job so that they run into one another and fuse intimately. Each separate act requires your full attention while you are doing it. After you have practiced the parts separately, you can not only do each with greater facility and less attention but can also gradually put them together into a smoothly running whole.

  All of this is common knowledge about learning a complex skill. We say it here merely because we want you to realize that learning to read is at least as complex as learning to ski or to typewrite or to play tennis. If you can recall your patience in any other learning experience you have had, you will be more tolerant of instructors who will shortly enumerate a long list of rules for reading.

  The person who has had one experience in acquiring a complex skill knows that he need not fear the array of rules that present themselves at the beginning of something new to be learned. He knows that he does not have to worry about how all the separate acts in which he must become separately proficient are going to work together.

  The multiplicity of the rules indicates the complexity of the one habit to be formed, not a plurality of distinct habits. The parts coalesce and telescope as each reaches the stage of automatic execution. When all the subordinate acts can be done more or less automatically, you have formed the habit of the whole performance. Then you can think about tackling p. 56 an expert run you have never skied before, or reading a book that you once thought was too difficult for you. At the beginning, the learner pays attention to himself and his skill in the separate acts. When the acts have lost their separateness in the skill of the whole performance, the learner can at last pay attention to the goal that the technique he has acquired enables him to reach.

  We hope we have encouraged you by the things we have said in these pages. It is hard to learn to read well. Not only is reading, especially analytical reading, a very complex activity—much more complex than skiing; it is also much more of a mental activity. The beginning skier must think of physical acts that he can later forget and perform almost automatically. It is relatively easy to think of and be conscious of physical acts. It is much harder to think of mental acts, as the beginning analytical reader must do; in a sense, he is thinking about his own thoughts. Most of us are unaccustomed to doing this. Nevertheless, it can be done, and a person who does it cannot help learning to read much better.

  Part Two – The Third Level of Reading:

  Analytical Reading

  Chapter 6 – Pigeonholing A Book

  p. 59 We said at the beginning of this book that the instruction in reading that it provides applies to anything you have to or want to read. However, in expounding the rules of analytical reading, as we will do in Part Two, we may seem to be ignoring that fact. We will usually, if not always, refer to the reading of whole books. Why is this so?

  The answer is simple. Reading a whole book, and especially a long and difficult one, poses the severest problems any reader can face. Reading a short story is almost always easier than reading a novel; reading an article is almost always easier than reading a book on the same subject. If you can read an epic poem or a novel, you can read a lyric or a short story; if you can read an expository book—a history, a philosophical work, a scientific treatise—you can read an article or abstract in the same field.

  Hence everything that we will say about reading books applies to reading other materials of the kinds indicated. You are to understand, when we refer to the reading of books, that the rules expounded refer to lesser and more easily understood materials, too. Sometimes the rules do not apply to the latter in quite the same way, or to the extent that they apply to whole books. Nevertheless, it will always be easy for you to adapt them so that they are applicable.

  The Importance of Classifying Books

  p. 60 The first rule of analytical reading can be expressed as follows: RULE 1. YOU MUST KNOW WHAT KIND OF BOOK YOU ARE READING, AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS AS EARLY IN THE PROCESS AS POSSIBLE, PREFERABLY BEFORE YOU BEGIN TO READ.

  You must know, for instance, whether you are reading fiction—a novel, a play, an epic, a lyric—or whether it is an expository work of some sort. Almost every reader knows a work of fiction when he sees it. Or so it seems—and yet this is not always easy. Is Portnoy’s Complaint a novel or a psychoanalytical study? Is Naked Lunch a fiction or a tract against drug abuse, similar to the books that used to recount the horrors of alcohol for the betterment of readers? Is Gone with the Wind a romance or a history of the South before and during the Civil War? Do Main Street and The Grapes of Wrath belong in the category of belles-lettres or are both of them sociological studies, the one concentrating on urban experiences, the other on agrarian life?

  All of these, of course, are novels; all of them appeared on the fiction side of the best-seller lists. Yet the questions are not absurd. Just by their titles, it would be hard to tell in the case of Main Street and Middletown which was fiction and which was social science. There is so much social science in some contemporary novels, and so much fiction in much of sociology, that it is hard to keep them apart. But there is another kind of science, too—physics and chemistry, for instance—in books like The Andromeda Strain or the novels of Robert Heinlein or Arthur C. Clarke. And a book like The Universe and Dr. Einstein, while clearly not fiction, is almost as “readable” as a novel, and probably more readable than some of the novels of, say, William Faulkner.

  An expository book is one that conveys knowledge primarily, “knowledge” being construed broadly. Any book that consists primarily of opinions, theories, hypotheses, or speculations, for which the claim is made more or less explicitly that p. 61 they are true in some sense, conveys knowledge in this meaning of knowledge and is an expository work. As with fiction, most people know an expository work when they see it. Here, however, the problem is not to distinguish nonfiction from fiction, but to recognize that there are various kinds of expository books. It is not merely a question of knowing which books are primarily instructive, but also which are instructive in a particular way. The kinds of information or enlightenment that a history and a philosophical work afford are not the same. The problems dealt with by a book on physics and one on morals are not the same, nor are the methods the writers employ in solving such different problems.

  Thus this first rule of analytical reading, though it is applicable to all books, applies particularly to nonfictional, expository works. How do you go about following the rule, particularly its last clause?

  As we have already suggested, you do so by first inspecting the book—giving it an inspectional reading. You read the title, the subtitle, the table of contents, and you at least glance at the preface or introduction by the author and at the index. If the book has a dust jacket, you look at the publisher’s blurb. These are the signal flags the author waves to let you know which way the wind is blowing. It is not his fault if you will not stop, look, and listen.

  What You Can Learn from the Title of a Book

  The numbers of readers who pay no attention to the signals is larger than you might expect. We have had this experience again and again with students. We have asked them what a book was about. We have asked them, in the most general terms, to tell us what sort of book it was. This is a good way, almost an indispensable way, to begin a discussion of a book. Nevertheless, it is often hard to get any kind of answer to the question.

  Let us take a couple of examples of the kind of confusion p. 62 that can occur. In 1859, Darwin published a very famous book. A century later the entire English-speaking world celebrated the publication of the book. It was discussed endlessly, and its influence was assessed by learned and not-so-learned commentators. The book was about the theory of evolution, and the word �
�species” was in the title. What was the title?

  Probably you said The Origin of Species, in which case you were correct. But you might not have said that. You might have said that the title was The Origin of the Species. Recently, we asked some twenty-five reasonably well-read persons what the title of Darwin’s book was and more than half said The Origin of the Species. The reason for the mistake is obvious; they supposed, never having read the book, that it had something to do with the development of the human species. In fact, it has little or nothing to do with that subject, which Darwin covered in a later book, The Descent of Man. The Origin of Species is about what its title says it is about—namely the proliferation in the natural world of a vast number of species of plants and animals from an originally much smaller number of species, owing mainly to the principle of natural selection. We mention this common error because many think they know the title of the book, although few have actually ever read the title carefully and thought about what it means.

  Here is another example. In this case we will not ask you to remember the title, but to think about what it means. Gibbon wrote a famous, and famously long, book about the Roman Empire. He called it The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Almost everybody who takes up the book recognizes that title; and most people, even without the book in their hand, know the title. Indeed, the phrase “decline and fall” has become proverbial. Nevertheless, when we asked the same twenty-five well-read people why the first chapter is called “The Extent and Military Force of the Empire in the Age of the Antonines,” they had no idea. They did not see that if the book as a whole was titled Decline and Fall, then it p. 63 might be assumed that the narrative would begin with the high point of the Roman Empire, and continue through to the end. Unconsciously, they had translated “decline and fall” into “rise and fall.” They were puzzled because there was no discussion of the Roman Republic, which ended a century and a half before the Age of the Antonines. If they had read the title carefully they could have assumed that the Age of the Antonines was the high point of the Empire, even if they had not known it before. Reading the title, in other words, could have given them essential information about the book before they started to read it; but they had failed to do that, as most people fail to do even with an unfamiliar book.

  One reason why titles and prefaces are ignored by many readers is that they do not think it important to classify the book they are reading. They do not follow this first rule of analytical reading. If they tried to follow it, they would be grateful to the author for helping them. Obviously, the author thinks it is important for the reader to know the kind of book he is being given. That is why he goes to the trouble of making it plain in the preface, and usually tries to make his title—or at least his subtitle—descriptive. Thus, Einstein and Infeld, in their preface to The Evolution of Physics, tell the reader that they expect him to know “that a scientific book, even though popular, must not be read in the same way as a novel.” They also construct an analytical table of contents to advise the reader in advance of the details of their treatment. In any event, the chapter headings listed in the front serve the purpose of amplifying the significance of the main title.

  The reader who ignores all these things has only himself to blame if he is puzzled by the question, What kind of book is this? He is going to become more perplexed. If he cannot answer that question, and if he never asks it of himself, he is going to be unable to answer a lot of other questions about the book.

  Important as reading titles is, it is not enough. The clearest titles in the world, the most explicit front matter, will not p. 64 help you to classify a book unless you have the broad lines of classification already in your mind.

  You will not know the sense in which Euclid’s Elements of Geometry and William James’ Principles of Psychology are books of the same sort if you do not know that psychology and geometry are both sciences—and, incidentally, if you do not know that “elements” and “principles” mean much the same thing in these two titles (though not in general), nor will you further be able to distinguish them as different unless you know there are different kinds of science. Similarly, in the case of Aristotle’s Politics and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, you can tell how these books are alike and different only if you know what a practical problem is, and what different kinds of practical problems there are.

  Titles sometimes make the grouping of books easy. Anyone would know that Euclid’s Elements, Descartes’ Geometry, and Hubert’s Foundations of Geometry are three mathematical books, more or less closely related in subject matter. This is not always the case. It might not be so easy to tell from the titles that Augustine’s The City of God, Hobbes’ Leviathan, and Rousseau’s Social Contract are political treatises, although a careful perusal of their chapter headings would reveal the problems that are common to these three books.

  Again, however, to group books as being of the same kind is not enough; to follow this first rule of reading you must know what that kind is. The title will not tell you, nor all the rest of the front matter, nor even the whole book itself sometimes, unless you have some categories you can apply to classify books intelligently. In other words, this rule has to be made a little more intelligible if you are to follow it intelligently. It can only be made intelligible by drawing distinctions and thus creating categories that make sense and will stand up to the test of time.

  We have already discussed a rough classification of books. The main distinction, we said, was between works of fiction, on the one hand, and works conveying knowledge, or expository p. 65 works, on the other hand. Among expository works, we can further distinguish history from philosophy, and both from science and mathematics.

  Now this is all very well as far as it goes. This is a classification scheme with fairly perspicuous categories, and most people could probably place most books in the right category if they thought about it. But not all books in all categories.

  The trouble is that as yet we have no principles of classification. We will have more to say about these principles as we proceed in our discussion of the higher levels of reading. For the moment, we want to confine ourselves to one basic distinction, a distinction that applies across the board to all expository works. It is the distinction between theoretical and practical works.

  Practical vs. Theoretical Books

  Everyone uses the words “theoretical” and “practical,” but not everyone knows what they mean, perhaps least of all the hardheaded practical man who distrusts all theorists, especially if they are in the government. For such persons, “theoretical” means visionary or even mystical; “practical” means something that works, something that has an immediate cash return. There is an element of truth in this. The practical has to do with what works in some way, at once or in the long run. The theoretical concerns something to be seen or understood. If we polish the rough truth that is here being grasped, we come to the distinction between knowledge and action as the two ends a writer may have in mind.

  But, you may say, in dealing with expository books, are we not dealing with books that convey knowledge? How does action come into it? The answer, of course, is that intelligent action depends on knowledge. Knowledge can be used in many ways, not only for controlling nature and inventing useful machines or instruments but also for directing human conduct p. 66 and regulating man’s operations in various fields of skill. What we have in mind here is exemplified by the distinction between pure and applied science, or, as it is sometimes very inaccurately expressed, between science and technology.

  Some books and some teachers are interested only in the knowledge itself that they have to communicate. This does not mean that they deny its utility, or that they insist that knowledge is good only for its own sake. They simply limit themselves to one kind of communication or teaching, and leave the other kind to other men. These others have an interest beyond knowledge for its own sake. They are concerned with the problems of human life that knowledge can help to solve. They communicate knowled
ge, too, but always with a view to and an emphasis upon its application.

  To make knowledge practical we must convert it into rules of operation. We must pass from knowing what is the case to knowing what to do about it if we wish to get somewhere. This can be summarized in the distinction between knowing that and knowing how. Theoretical books teach you that something is the case. Practical books teach you how to do something you want to do or think you should do.

  This book is practical, not theoretical. Any guidebook is a practical book. Any book that tells you either what you should do or how to do it is practical. Thus you see that the class of practical books includes all expositions of arts to be learned, all manuals of practice in any field, such as engineering or medicine or cooking, and all treatises that are conveniently classified as moral, such as books on economic, ethical, or political problems. We will later explain why this last group of books, properly called “normative,” constitutes a very special category of practical books.

  Probably no one would question our calling expositions of arts to be learned and manuals or rule books, practical works. But the “practical” man to whom we have referred might object to the notion that a book on ethics, say, or one on economics, was practical. He might say that such a book was not practical because it was not true or would not work.

  p. 67 In fact, this is irrelevant to the point, although a book about economics that is not true is a bad book. Strictly speaking, any ethical work teaches us how to live our lives, tells us what we should do and not do, and often informs us of the rewards and punishments attached to doing and not doing it. Thus, whether or not we agree with its conclusions, any such work is practical. (Some modern sociological studies merely report the actual behavior of men, without judging it. These are neither ethical nor practical books. They are theoretical works—works of science.)