How to Read a Book

My review of a timeless classic

I’ve recently read the 1940 classic ‘How to Read a Book’ by Mortimer J. Alder and Charles Van Doren and thought I’d share some of the ideas encapsulated in the book and my opinion on whether I think they work or not. The book itself is worth a read but does feel at times a little dry and monotonous. The tone can feel a little hierarchal, but this book is over 80 years old and there are chapters and chapters full of great insight and wisdom to be digested.

The book's main thesis is that there are 4 levels of reading with the first being the least important and superficial and the last being the most important and desirable. The 4 levels of reading are Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical and Syntopical.

Elementary reading

Elementary reading is broken up into 4 stages and starts off with “reading readiness” which it is claimed starts at birth and continues until around ages 6 & and 7. The child must understand letters to understand basic words.

The authors also mention vision, hearing and the ability to work with other children to judge when the child is ready to go to the second stage, which is where they learn to read “very simple materials”. This is the accumulation of about 3/400 hundred basic words by the end of the first year. Context is also introduced and by the end of this year, it is claimed pupils should be reading and enjoying simple books.

The third stage is based on an increase in vocabulary building and is usually where children begin to explore different genres of books and read for different purposes.

Finally, the fourth stage is characterised by refining and enhancing the previous skills and it’s at this stage the reader, in their early teens can compare different books, authors and genres with context. It is hoped that this last stage of elementary reading inspires students to pursue a life dedicated to reading.

Inspectional reading

Inspectional reading is the second level of reading and is described as “a true level of reading” according to the authors. Inspectional reading is broken down into two types: systemic skimming or pre-reading and superficial.

The idea is that not all books are created equal and by definition, some are worth reading and some are not. It’s hard for the reader to know this just by looking at the book so the authors recommend a few steps to help you decide if it’s worth reading or not. This consists of reading the title and sub-title, the preface if it has one, the table of contents in their entirety in which the authors describe this as the book’s “roadmap”, the index, the publisher’s blurb if it has one, summaries of chapters if they have them and a casual finger through of some of the pages that may interest you.

It goes without saying that you would not read a fiction book like this, and great pain is made to describe the different “types” of books there are and how they should be read later on in the book. Fiction is typically not to be read like this unless you have an appetite for SPOILERS! The above should take no less than a few minutes and no more than an hour.

I recently did this with the book The Company Valuation Playbook by Charles Sunnucks after failing to finish it last year. I always wondered if I’d missed any valuable information so I gave the book a quick skim following the steps above and although I did find one or two bits of information that I will use going forward I remembered why I didn’t finish it.

Moving on to superficial reading. Superficial and skimming are one and the same thing but for people new to learning these steps the authors separate them for the time being.

The idea behind superficial reading is that sometimes we bite off more than we can chew with books. I went to Ibiza 10 years ago and stayed with my mates who were a couple. The girl had a book on the coffee table in their apartment, so I picked it up and had a quick look. I decided I liked the book, so I purchased it when I got home. The book was Freud’s classic The Interpretation of Dreams. Now, I should have known better because the girl whose book it was had an IQ roughly equal to the paper the book was written on but at home, I fared no better when trying to “interpret” what the hell Freud was going on about. I definitely don’t fancy my mum for starters! It’s consequently stayed on my bookshelf since.

This is where if I’d known about this step it could have helped me. When dealing with a challenging book the authors suggest “In tackling a difficult book for this first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away”. After you have done this, you can go back through the book again if you wish to try to understand better the parts you could not in the first read. If you don’t wish to go through it again then at least you learnt a certain percentage of a difficult book which is better than if you had given up at the first difficult passage. No on to the third level.

Analytical reading

This next step was the one I found to be the most interesting and useful when reading the book.

The first rule (Pigeonholing) is classifying the book you wish to read. This sounds simple enough, but the author gives some examples of the complexity and confusion that can be had when deciding what the book you are holding is about. An example of my own is this: Is George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, autobiographical or a reference to the Spanish Civil War? It could be both or it could just be one, but it’s deemed important for you to know.

Again, the authors drum on about how important it is to fully understand the title of the book and after completing stage 2 above you should have a better idea of what the book is about. This may seem counterintuitive, after all, if it takes you roughly 1 hour to complete the steps above wouldn’t it be better to just read the first few chapters and make your decision then? The answer is there is no right answer, but the book suggests it’s not correct and I’d agree. I’ve read many books that I have not finished. Some of them are ‘classics’, new and old and with this new knowledge I have I’m quite inclined to go back and find the bits of nuggets that I may have missed that may lead me to want to read the whole book. After all, some books just take a lifetime to get into at which point you’re bored, and it gets shelved.

The authors spend a few pages on theoretical books vs. practical books which often can get confused. If you’re looking to be able to do something, then reading a theoretical book may not be the best way forward. Theoretical books teach you that something is the case, and practical books teach you how to do something.

“There are certain problems, some of them very important, that can be solved in an armchair by a man who knows how to think in the light of common experience”.

The second rule (X-raying) is to understand the ‘unity’ of the book in as short as a sentence or as long as a short paragraph. Easier said than done when you have not even finished it.

“The reader who says ‘I know what it is, but just can’t say it’ probably does not even fool himself”.

That one will take some practice for sure. This rule seems a little uptight and unnecessary but it’s a good exercise to practise. Maybe.

The third rule is to understand the ‘major parts’ of the book and how they interconnect with the unity of the book. This could be as easy as the chapters in the book, should it be organised in such a simple and methodical way, but books seldom are. There are chapters and sub-chapters, aphorisms, quotes and references amongst other things.

The authors give a great analogy which will help you understand better. A mansion is a house (a book) but it's full of different rooms and spaces (chapters, sub-chapters etc.) which each have their own independent structure, layout and decoration, but they are not separate from the house. They are all connected through hallways, staircases, arches etc. and thus form part of the whole. How many times have you been in a house where it just did not flow? It seemed confusing and odd for it to have been constructed in this way. Books are the same. When you get a book that flows perfectly it’s like walking through a house that takes your breath away. It flows from one place to another and where there are surprises it’s in a good way.

The fourth rule is to find out what the author's problems were. When writing a book an author usually has questions they want answering. It’s important to understand what the primary questions are, and which are the secondary ones. What questions are theoretical, or which are practical questions? These 4 rules constitute the first part of analytical reading. Now onto the next set of rules.

The fifth rule is concerned with the important words the authors use to get their message across in the book. This it is said, will help you come to terms with the author. Books consist of 1000’s of words but there are words the author uses that matter more to them.

“When you find an author telling you how a particular word has been used by others, and why he chooses to use it otherwise, you can be sure that word makes a great difference to him”.

I found this rule probably the most intriguing and useful. Countless times a day I skip past words without trying to understand the context in which they are being used. It’s easy to read a book, not fully grasp a word or part of the book and just carry on moving forward.

We also do this in conversation but perhaps might not want to be constantly interrupting people and questioning them on why they used a certain word. It goes without saying though that the more words you understand the better the chances are of understanding what the author is trying to tell you. Therefore, taking a second to try to understand difficult words might seem monotonous but will help you digest what is trying to be said.

I’ve noticed, particularly at work where I have quite a few emails a day come to me from engineers and architects, clients and project managers that it would make my life easier if I tried a little harder to understand what it is they are trying to say. Even if I don’t have an engineering degree. The book goes into great detail concerning words and how they interact with other words, and I won’t do it much justice by summarising it here.

The sixth & seventh rules are closely connected. The sixth is to find the most important sentences in the book and discover the propositions they contain. A proposition can be considered a declaration of something, or a judgement that you can either choose to accept or deny. In practical books, this would be the how to do something. As with words, not all sentences are important, but the authors believe finding the key sentences, that is the sentences that seem to have some form of premise, judgement, summary or conclusion are the ones we need to be paying attention to as these will pose as the authors intentions set out in the book. This could mean forming your own sequence of sentences deemed to be important.

“If you never ask yourself about the meaning of a passage, you cannot expect the book to give you any insight you do not already possess”.

The eighth rule is to find out what the author’s solutions are. Once you have found the author's important words, and propositions and formed key sentences the next step is to understand what the author’s solutions are. This should be self-explanatory but it’s hardly surprising to get to the end of a book and still be wanting for more of an explanation to the author's propositions.

These 8 rules offer tremendous value to the reader when practised and applied but in all honesty, you’re not going to do this every time you pick up a book and the authors don’t suggest this either.

Not all books are worth an analytical read but if you were to just follow a couple of these for all reading, such as I mostly do for rules 5 & 6 you will become an infinitely better reader. There are another 7 rules for analytical reading that are mainly concerned with “general maxims of intellectual etiquette” and “special criteria for points of criticism” that I believe most readers don’t need to bother with. They concern themselves with ways in which to argue with the author if you believe they are incorrect but if you cannot show them why they are wrong then they can, by default, not be wrong.

There is a chapter on the difference between knowledge and opinion but to be honest I found these rules to be rigid and obtuse. They seem to me to protect the author insomuch that unless you can prove them wrong then you cannot say they are wrong or form an opinion. This might be important if you’re a student in a university or on an expert panel where discussion is to be had but if I think a book is sh*t or an author is wrong, I don’t need to write an essay telling them why this is so. I think the authors miss something here. I understand what they are saying but I don’t agree with it. I understand that you cannot say Einstein’s theory of relativity is wrong just because you think it is. That of course isn’t right, and you’d be a fool to think otherwise but I don’t have to understand the ins and outs of Totalitarianism to know that I think it’s wrong. If I don’t like a movie, I don’t have to tell the director why I think he got it wrong.

Syntopical Reading

This last chapter is the pinnacle of reading, as suggested by the author and is detailed in 5 steps. Before we outline these 5 steps, I think this last stage is beyond the needs of most readers. Like rules 9-15 of analytical reading, I think that the people concerned with this particular way of reading are probably quite few and far between. People with specific professions or students will most likely benefit from this as well as university professors and staff.

The idea behind syntopical reading is it’s focused on a narrow field and spread across different authors or books or both. Let's say you want to understand investing and set out to do so. Investing as a subject is gigantic. Not only do you have all the financial stuff to learn but there are regulations, industries, economies, history, psychology, and that’s not exhaustive either, but nonetheless, you set out to determine your investment strategy. The first step is to determine the relevant passages and at this level of reading it is thrust upon the reader to determine this. As mentioned above, investing as a subject has a whole labyrinth of pathways for you to get stuck down various rabbit holes so as a potential would-be investor, I need to set out what it is I’m trying to figure out. In this case, I’m concerned with buying quality companies at fair prices. This to me would suggest I need to be able to understand financial statements, sectors and industries and the value of companies at any given time. I may feel the need to delve into the psychology of human behaviour and our biases to try and protect myself.

This first step will cut the wheat from the chaff. Do I need to understand the taxes of various countries? Probably important but, at this point probably not. With this in mind, I need to set forth and create a bibliography of the books (nowadays articles and other forms of information are just as important) I am going to need.

With my books et al, the next step is to give them all an inspectional read. Yes, you read that right. With a subject such as investing as mentioned before this could be an enormous amount of information you need to get through, but inspectional reading is your superpower here. You’ll probably find that some books just aren’t worth your time and again this is where we’ll reduce what we don’t need.

You may have accumulated 20 books on valuation, industry analysis, economics, human psychology and behaviour and after giving them all a quick once over realised that 8 will do. It takes about 8 hours for the average person to read an average book. That’s 96 hours saved or 4 days of straight reading. Phew!

The next steps concern bringing the authors to terms with one another and with you. With syntopical reading, it is you who asks the questions, and it is you who determines the language. We cannot give special preference to one author over another. Think of yourself as a translator and the books the language that need to be interpreted from their languages into yours. This obviously takes a great amount of skill and practice and truth be told, how do you know if you're asking the right questions? Is your interpretation of the author's propositions, correct? A way of looking at this is to come up with your questions and go searching in the various books for the author's answers to this question.

An example of this could be: What determines if a company is good or bad? What makes a quality company? This should be easy enough to find in each book if your list of chosen books fits the questions you wish to ask. One author's opinion on quality companies will probably be different to another but what you can look for in this is any commonalties. One author may prefer a different metric or ratio to another, but both agree that large amounts of debt, especially debt that is repayable in the near future or is more than the company generates in turnover is not a sign of a quality company. I’ve done an article on inverse thinking which may help you when it comes to figuring out what questions to ask.

The last 2 steps are on defining the issues and analysing the discussion. Think of yourself as a conductor. The individual instruments your books. When you ask a question, do the individual parts (the books) play along in harmony or is something amiss? Perhaps worse than that it sounds a mess and conflicting. Your role as the conductor is to get the most out of this bunch but that does not mean that it will be harmonious.

The group could get along nicely and agree on the song you're asking them to play, or they could decide to play what they want. It’s not uncommon for two authors to have different opinions on the same thing. You only need to think of something such as climate heating, which is backed by science to see how both sides can feel that they’re in fact the ones that are right. If your question was how to create a fairer society then you can see how people end up dedicating their entire lives to this one question and for the most part, get nowhere. After all, that’s a question that’s been asked since men (and women) have been able to communicate and we’re still asking it today.

Summary

Although this is a longer article than I typically post I feel I’ve still left plenty out of the book that could have been included. The authors mention reading speeds, tips on note taking, reading aids and not to mention in-depth chapters on how to read certain topics such as science, maths, philosophy, poetry, history and others. The reason for this was the steps summarised above and detailed in the book are in fact all you would need to learn and the others I believe are ‘nice to have’ but do form a more comprehensive package.

I enjoyed this book a lot but did feel it was difficult to read at times. This was due to the fact I felt the authors repeated themselves repeatedly and I think made a meal out of explaining things in most cases. I also at times, found them to be quite annoying and uptight if I’m being honest but I realise the book was written at a different time. This will be a book that I go back to time and again when I’m reading other books to make sure I’m doing myself and the book justice. A recommended read for anybody wishing to brush up on their reading, a little or a great deal.