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

by Mortimer J. Adler

STEP 1 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: FINDING THE RELEVANT PASSAGES.

Your aim is to find the passages in the books that are most germane to your needs.

You do not want to lose sight of the fact that you are reading it for an ulterior purpose—namely, for the light it may throw on your own problem—not for its own sake.

STEP 2 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: BRINGING THE AUTHORS TO TERMS.

Thus it is you who must establish the terms, and bring your authors to them rather than the other way around.

STEP 3 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: GETTING THE QUESTIONS CLEAR.

But since we ourselves are establishing the terminology in this case, we are faced with the task of establishing a set of neutral propositions as well.

STEP 4 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: DEFINING THE ISSUES.

Usually, differences in answers must be ascribed to different conceptions of the question as often as to different views of the subject.

STEP 5 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: ANALYZING THE DISCUSSION.

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

But it is easier to take no sides than to look at all sides.

That paradox can be stated thus: Unless you know what books to read, you cannot read syntopically, but unless you can read syntopically, you do not know what to read.

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.

To deny that an idea can be expressed in more than one set of terms is similar to denying that translation is possible from one natural language to another.

But the difficult is not the impossible.

Another is that there is in the East no single tradition, as there is in the West, and we would have to be learned in all Eastern traditions in order to do the job well.

Great Books of the Western World

Gateway to the Great Books