How to Read a Book

by Charles van Doren

Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.

The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day.

Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.

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.

Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do.

Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

That rule is simply this: In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.

Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?