How to Read a Book: the classic guide to intelligent reading

by Mortimer J. Adler

It would be dogmatic, not dialectical, if, on any of the important issues that it identified and analyzed, it asserted or tried to prove the truth or falsity of any view. If it did that, the syntopical analysis would cease to be syntopical; it would become simply one more voice in the discussion, thereby losing its detached and objective character.

The syntopical reader, in short, tries to look at all sides and to take no sides.

he must constantly refer back to the actual text of his authors, reading the relevant passages over and over; and, in presenting the results of his work to a wider audience, he must quote the opinion or argument of an author in the writer’s own language.

a reference book that tells you where to go to find the relevant passages on a large number of subjects of interest, without at the same time saying how the passages should be read—without prejudging their meaning or significance. The Syntopicon is an example of such a work.

Produced in the 1940s, it is a topical index to the set of books titled Great Books of the Western World. Under each of some 3,000 topics or subjects, it lists references to pages within the set where that subject is discussed. Some of the references are to passages covering many pages, others are to key paragraphs or even parts of paragraphs. No more time is required to find them than is needed to take down the indicated volume and flip through its pages.

it always provides you with at least a place to start on any syntopical reading project.

there are two main stages of syntopical reading. One is preparatory, and the other is syntopical reading proper. Let us write out all of these steps for review.

I. SURVEYING THE FIELD PREPARATORY TO SYNTOPICAL READING

1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject

2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography

II. SYNTOPICAL READING OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY AMASSED IN STAGE I

1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant

2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing,

3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers,

4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another.

5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated.

We have shown that activity is the essence of good reading, and that the more active reading is, the better it is.

We have defined active reading as the asking of questions, and we have indicated what questions must be asked of any book,

We have identified and discussed the four levels of reading,

the rules of inspectional, analytical, and syntopical reading.

You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.

Reading for information does not stretch your mind any more than reading for amusement. It may seem as though it does, but that is merely because your mind is fuller of facts than it was before you read the book. However, your mind is essentially in the same condition that it was before.

a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable—books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

There are some relationships, both among human beings and between human beings and the nonhuman world, about which no one can have the last word.

These are matters about which you cannot think too much, or too well. The greatest books can help you to think better about them, because they were written by men and women who thought better than other people about them.

But if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you.

Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels. Your impression of increased understanding on your previous reading was not false. The book truly lifted you then. But now, even though you have become wiser and more knowledgeable, it can lift you again.

you should seek out the few books that can have this value for you. They are the books that will teach you the most, both about reading and about life. They are the books to which you will want to return over and over. They are the books that will help you to grow.

Reading well, which means reading actively, is thus not only a good in itself, nor is it merely a means to advancement in our work or career. It also serves to keep our minds alive and growing.

The Old Testament

Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) * Dialogues (esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus)

Marcus Aurelius (121–180) * Meditations

The New Testament

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) Works (esp. The New Life, On Monarchy, * The Divine Comedy)

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Notebooks

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) Essays * Advancement of Learning

John Milton (1608–1674) Works (esp. * the minor poems, * Areopagitica, * Paradise Lost,

Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) Robinson Crusoe

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) * Critique of Pure Reason

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) * Faust

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) * The Origin of Species

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) Crime and Punishment The Idiot * The Brothers Karamazov

Mark Twain (1835–1910) The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn The Mysterious Stranger

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900) Thus Spoke Zarathustra Beyond Good and Evil The Genealogy of Morals The Will to Power

John Dewey (1859–1952) How We Think

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) The Magic Mountain

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) The First Circle Cancer Ward