What is the overall message?

The authors of “How to Read a Book”, Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, argue that reading is an active pursuit, not a passive one and that there are four levels to reading:

• Elementary: the pure mechanical act of reading where you translate written symbols into meaning. 
• Inspectional: prior to reading the contents of the book, you skim – the table of content, index, chapter titles, the forward, etc. – to prime yourself to better understand the message of the book. 
• Analytical: After reading and understanding what the author is saying, you form an opinion on the validity of their argument. 
• Comparative: After reading a series of books on a subject, compare and contrast different works by different authors to fully understand a single subject or idea. 

The first two levels of reading is rather passive with the goal being to collect facts – where you read to gain information and add to your collections of facts on that subject without exerting extra effort. The latter two levels of reading are more active, with the goal of comprehension – where you not only do you add to your collection of facts, you also utilize those newly acquired facts to change the way you think about the subject. Instead of just knowing what is the case, you begin to think about why it is the case. Although Comparative Reading is the most comprehensive form of reading, it moreso answers the question “how to understand a subject” and is an impractical approach when simply trying to understand a single book. As such, Adler and Doren state that readers should focus on Analytical Reading.

A quick guide to know if you’ve read analytically is by being able to answer these four questions:

1. What is the overall message or theme of the book?
   • This should be a quick synopsis, not a detailed summary.
2. How does the author’s argument unfold?
   • What are the main principles and supporting evidence?
3. Is the author’s argument valid?
   • Provide evidence to support your opinions.
4. What are the implications?
   • If you agree with the author’s argument, how will you act on it?

How does the author’s argument unfold?

Adler and Doren dive further into each level of reading, explaining the advantages of each level and tips for successfully executing each level. 

Elementary Reading

There are no advantages as this is the most basic form of reading – the same way you learned to read as a child. Adler and Doren do offer that Speed Reading is helpful for reading more quickly and efficiently. This involves reading without subvocalizing (pronouncing and hearing each word in your head). 

To practice this: use your hand to cover the text, and move your hand downward faster than your current reading speed. Your brain will be forced to catch up. Skip any words or ideas you don’t know, look them up after finishing the book. 

The downside to Speed Reading is that increasing reading speed sacrifices comprehension to a certain degree. Fortunately, there are factors that can minimize or eliminate this trade-off:

• Having prior knowledge in the subject matter
• Intense focus while reading
• Continuous practice reading difficult and complex texts

Inspectional Reading

As previously stated, this is the skimming of a book to understand its main points prior to reading the book itself. This form of reading is best for those trying to read a book with a limited time. When you read a book, you’re trying to understand what the book is about at the same time you’re trying to understand what the author is saying. So the advantage of Inspectional Reading is that by skimming the book to get a sense of what’s coming, you’ll be in the right headspace to process the information when it comes. Note, this also ties back to improving Speed Reading as skimming the book will provide you with “prior knowledge” in the subject matter – another reason why Inspectional Reading is great for speed. 

A quick guide to knowing if you’ve done Inspectional Reading correctly is by being able to answer these three questions:

1. What genre does the book fit into?
2. What is the overall message of the book?
3. How does the author present and develop their arguments?

Before reading the book:

• Read the title, preface, table of contents, and index.
• Find the main chapters of the book, and read the summaries of those chapters (usually at the end of each chapter).
• Flip through the whole book to get a general sense of the structure and pacing. 
• Read online summaries (such as this one). 

After reading the book:

• Put the book’s lessons into practice immediately to retain the information without Analytical Reading. 

Analytical Reading

This deep and analytical approach to reading allows you to gain the most understanding from the book. Once again, in addition to understanding what is being said, you also form a personal opinion about its validity.

Understand the Author
Find what problem the author is trying to solve or what question they’re trying to answer. If it is a theoretical book, the author might answer whether or not something is true. If it is a practical book, they may answer what we should do and how we should do it. 

Understand the Author’s Arguments
To identify the author’s arguments, Adler and Doren advises to look for these three things: 

• Keywords: look for keywords as they convey a wealth of information and are used repeatedly. 
• Key Sentences: after finding keywords, look for important sentences as they express parts of the author’s argument. They can be found by looking for sentences that are emphasized stylistically or sentences that contain keywords. 
• Propositions: after finding these key sentences, identify the propositions within them. Rephrase them in an intuitive way that’s easy for you to understand – to really let this sink in, try writing down this restatement by hand. 

Criticize the Book
Once, and only once, you understand a book, it is your duty, as the reader, to criticize it. Determine which questions the author has answered and which they have not, and decide whether the author knew they’ve failed to answer them. Are there any important ideas the author didn’t mention? In essence, you’re trying to answer whether or not you agree with the author. It is important to avoid being overly contentious or argumentative when criticizing an author and keep an open mind. Upon agreeing or disagreeing with the author, you must back up your conclusion with evidence. Otherwise, you’re merely expressing your opinion, rather than a substantive statement. At the same time, you should distinguish between the author’s knowledge (arguments backed by evidence) and opinion. Here are some tips:

• Don’t play devil’s advocate by default. Don’t resent the author for being right or teaching you something new. 
• Don’t just agree with the author because they’re smart. Fully evaluate their work. 
• Critique rationally, not emotionally. 
• When reading, earnestly try taking the author’s point of view. 

If you disagree with the author, your disagreement must fit into a set of categories:

• Information: the author is missing key information or the information is wrong, outdated, or unsupported by outside sources.
• Logic: the author’s argument contains a logical fallacy. 
• Completeness: the author hasn’t fully addressed every important component of their argument or fully assessed the problem/question they’re attempting to solve. 

How to Approach Different Genres

While Analytical Reading is the best way to get the most out of reading, it still isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. Different genres require a slightly different approach. Observe.

• Practical books teach you how to do something, often with a set of rules or principles that’ll help guide you. Approach with the intention of applying the lessons from the book should you agree with them. 
• Fiction books aim to convey an experience. Approach with an open mind, allowing yourself to be emotionally affected. 
• Historical books highlight significant events in the past, teaching you how to echo the actions of people in the past (if it’s a positive event), or to avoid repeating history (if it’s a negative one). Approach while looking for commonalities between people across time, instead of just learning what happened. 
• Social science books include philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, psychology, etc. Approach without bias or your own disbelief in the lessons – assume the author’s arguments are true and see what results can be drawn from the conclusions. 

Comparative Reading

This is designed to understand a single subject from the perspective of multiple viewpoints (often conflicting). This can be broken down into very actional steps:

1. Create a list of works that may be relevant to the subject you’re trying to learn. 
2. Clearly define your subject and eliminate books from your list that don’t align. (This can be rather difficult as certain subjects can be very broad and require a whole library of books to fully understand it. In such cases, NARROW it down). 
3. Go through each book analytically, taking notes on passages you find most relevant. 
4. Rephrase each author’s work into a common language so it’s easier for you to compare. 
5. Create a set of questions that each author answers in their book. 
6. Understand the complexity of the issues. Take note of the different ways the authors answer the same/similar questions – this often means that the question they’re answering is a contentious and complex one. 
7. Organize the questions and answers from most general to least, then highlight how the questions are answered differently and explain why. 

Are the Author’s Arguments Valid?

I believe Adler and Doren’s arguments to be valid. Based on my own experience of taking a passive approach to reading, information retention is extremely poor. Upon rewriting the text in my own language, questioning the validity of the arguments presented, and putting the lessons into practice, I’ve gained a much deeper understanding of the message (such as in this case).

Although the ultimate message is to apply Analytical Reading, I appreciated the inclusion of Elementary, Inspectional, and Comparative Reading as breaking them down into different levels further illustrates the advantages and practicality of Analytical Reading. I found this book to be comprehensive in teaching the audience how to read as it includes helpful techniques to execute each level of reading well, and it also shares the mindset you should have when approaching different genres. However, for subjects in which you have little understanding, especially one that is technical, it can be difficult to critique the author without the use of external sources. In which case, it can slowly creep into Comparative Reading as you go down that rabbit hole looking for additional information and comparing it to the author’s arguments. 

What now?

For this book, I’ll keep this section rather brief as this entire post has been a testament to the implications this book has in my life. I plan on applying the Analytical Reading framework when reading books and using it to structure my future posts.