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

by Mortimer J. Adler

Suggestions for Reading Stories, Plays, and Poems

first, What is the book about as a whole?; second, What is being said in detail, and how?; and third, Is the book true, in whole or part?

The first question is answered when you are able to describe the unity of the plot of a story, play, or poem—“plot” being construed broadly to include the action or movement of a lyric poem as well as of a story.

The second question is answered when you are able to discern the role that the various characters play, and recount, in your own words, the key incidents and events in which they are involved.

And the third question is answered when you are able to give a reasoned judgment about the poetical truth of the work. Is it a likely story? Does the work satisfy your heart and your mind? Do you appreciat...

The fourth question is, What of it? In the case of expository books, an answer to this question implies so...

There, mental action alone is required. But if you are convinced that such a book is true, in whole or part, then you must agree with its conclusions, and if they imply some adjustment of your views of the subject, then you are more or less required to make those adjustments.

Sometimes a story is a better way of getting a point across—be it a political, economic, or moral point—than an expository work making the same point. George Orwell’s Animal Farm and his 1984 are both powerful attacks on totalitarianism.

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is an eloquent diatribe against the tyranny of technological progress. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle tells us more about the petty cruelty and inhumanity of the Soviet bureaucracy than a hundred factual studies and reports.

Imaginative writings can lead to action, but they do not have to. They belong in the realm of fine art.

A work of fine art is “fine” not because it is “refined” or “finished,” but because it is an end (finis, Latin, means end) in itself.

If you feel impelled because of a book you have read to go out and do something, ask yourself whether the work contains some implied statement that has produced this feeling.

To read it well, all you have to do is experience it.

Read it quickly and with total immersion. Ideally, a story should be read at one sitting, although this is rarely possible for busy people with long novels.

Nevertheless, the ideal should be approximated by compressing the reading of a good story into as short a time as feasible. Otherwise you will forget what happened, the unity of the plot will escape you, and you will be lost.

But in this case they are probably not so much reading the book as satisfying their more or less unconscious feelings about the events and the characters. We will return to that in a moment.

Read quickly, we suggest, and with total immersion. We have indicated the importance of letting an imaginative book work on you.

Let the characters into your mind and heart; suspend your disbelief, if such it is, about the events. Do not disapprove of something a character does bef...

Try as hard as you can to live in his world, not in yours; there, the things he does may be quite understandable. And do not judge the world as a whole until you are sure that you ...

Following this rule will allow you to answer the first question you should ask about any book—What is it about, as a whole? Unless you read it quickly you will fail to see the unity of the story. Unles...

The terms of a story, as we have observed, are its characters and incidents. You must become acquainted with the...

But here a word of wa...

They soon give up on the book in the belief that they will never be able to sort out all the complicated relationships, to know who is who. This is true of any big novel—and if a novel is really good, we want it to be as big as possible.

We should not expect to remember every character; many of them are merely background persons, who are there only to set off the actions of the main characters. However, by the time we have finished War and Peace or any big novel, we know who is important, and we do not forget.

We also, despite the plethora of incidents, soon learn what is important. Authors generally give a good deal of help in this respect; they do not want the reader to miss what is essential to the unfolding of the plot, so they flag it in various ways.

But our point is that you should not be anxious if all is not clear from the beginning.

So the reader of a story, looking back on it after he has finished it, understands the relation of events and the order of actions.

All of this comes down to the same point: you must finish a story in order to be able to say that you have read it well.

Fiction seems to be a necessity for human beings. Why is this?

One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs.

On the simplest level—and a discussion of this subject could be very complex—we like or dislike certain kinds of people more than others, without always being sure why.

If, in a novel, such people are rewarded or punished, we may have stronger feelings, either pro or con, about the book than it merits artistically.

For example, we are often pleased when a character in a novel inherits money, or otherwise comes into good fortune. However, this tends to be true only if the character is “sympathe...

We do not admit to ourselves that we would like to inherit the money, we merely s...

Many novels are about love—most are, perhaps—and it gives us pleasure to identify with the loving characters....

But we may not want to admit this; for to do so might make us feel, consciously, that our...

These are often satisfied in novels, where we can identify with either the conqueror or victim, or even with both. In each case, we are prone to say simply that we like “that kind of book”—without specifying or really knowing why.

Finally, we suspect that life as we know it is unjust. Why do good people suffer, and bad ones prosper?

In stories, this chaotic and unpleasant situation is adjusted, and that is ext...

In stories—in novels and narrative poems and plays—justice usually does exist. People get what they deserve; the author, who is like a god to his characters, sees to it that they are r...

One of the most irritating things about a bad story is that the people in it seem to be punished or rewarded with no rhyme or reason. The great storyteller makes no mistakes. He is able to convince us ...

There, terrible things happen to good men, but we see that the hero, even if he does not wholly deserve his fate,...

And we have a profound desire to share his understanding. If we only knew—then we could withstand whatever...

The tragic hero does learn why, though often, of course, only after the ruin of his life. We can share his insight without sharing his suffering.

from those that satisfy the deep unconscious needs of almost everybody.

As long as man is man, they will go on satisfying him, giving him something that he needs to have—a belief in justice and understanding and the allaying of anxiety.

We do not know, we cannot be sure, that the real world is good. But the world of a great story is somehow good. We want to live there as often and as long as we can.

Perhaps the most honored but probably the least read books in the great tradition of the Western World are the major epic poems, particularly the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost. This paradox requires some comment.

Judging by the very small number that have been completed successfully in the past 2,500 years, a long epic poem is apparently the most difficult thing a man can write.

Greater honor is due him if he produces a work that has the qualities of the five just mentioned. But they are certainly not easy to read.