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

by Mortimer J. Adler

But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. 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.

The problem with modern media in giving people easy packaging for complex information.

The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch—fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers. Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.

what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside,I elevates itself by the power of its own operations.

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.

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

So long as ambiguity persists, there is no meaning in common between writer and reader.

It can even be argued that the best poetry is that which is the most richly ambiguous, and it has been said with justice that any good poet is sometimes intentionally ambiguous in his writing.

In defense of ambiguity in poetry.

If you are reading a book that can increase your understanding, it stands to reason that not all of its words will be completely intelligible to you.

If you started with a book that was over your head—one, therefore, that was able to teach you something—you have come a long way.

The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging.

Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is, therefore, the most critical. He is the reader who finally responds to a book by the greatest effort to make up his own mind on the matters the author has discussed.

To be equally serious in receiving such communication, one must be not only a responsive but also a responsible listener.

To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man.

When the material you have read is itself primarily informational, you are challenged to go further and seek enlightenment. Even when you have been somewhat enlightened by what you have read, you are called upon to continue the search for significance.

Until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience.

Scientist should write better.

Not only must we resolutely refuse to accept the terminology of any one author; we must also be willing to face the possibility that no author’s terminology will be useful to us.

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

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.