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

by Mortimer J. Adler

The difficulty seems rather to lie in their elevation, in their approach to their subject matter.

Any of these major epics exerts enormous demands on the reader—demands of attention, of involvement, and of imagination. The effort required to read them is very great indeed.

For the rewards to be gained from a good reading—an analytical reading, as we should say—of these epics are at least as great as those to be gained from the reading of any ot...

We hope that you will take a stab at reading these five great epic poems, and that you will manage to get through all of them.

And you will be able to enjoy a further satisfaction. Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton—they are the authors that every good poet, to say nothing of other writers, has read.

Along with the Bible, they constitute the backbone of any seri...

A play is fiction, a story, and insofar as that is true, it should be read like a story.

When you read a play, you are not reading a complete work. The complete play (the work that the author intended you to apprehend) is only apprehended when it is acted on a stage.

Like music, which must be heard, a play lacks a physical dimension when we read it in a book. The reader must supply that dimension.

The only way to do that is to make a pretense of seeing it acted. Therefore, once you have discovered what the play is about, as a whole and in detail, and once you have answered the other questions you...

Explain the importance of these few words, and how that action is the climax of the work. You will have a lot of fun, and you will learn a lot about the play.

An example will show what we mean. In Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii, Polonius announces to the king and queen that Hamlet is insane because of his love for Ophelia, who has spurned the prince’s advances.

If so Hamlet’s conversations with both Polonius and Ophelia would mean one thing; if he did not overhear the plotting, they would mean another.

Many of Shakespeare’s plays require this kind of activity on the part of the reader.

Probably you have not read a play really well until you have pretended to put it on the stage in this way. At best, you have given it only a partial reading.

We have already suggested the importance of reading the plays through, as nearly as possible at one sitting, in order to get a feel for the whole.

But, since the plays are mostly in verse, and since the verse is more or less opaque in places because of changes in the language that have occurred since 1600, it is often desirable to read a puzzling passage out loud.

Read slowly, as if an audience were listening, and with “expression”—that is, try to make the words meani...

This simple device will clear up many difficulties. Only after it has failed should you tur...

There are many great expository works, and many great novels, stories, and lyric poems, but there are only a few great plays. However, those few—the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the plays of Shakespeare, Molière’s comedies, the works of a very few moderns—are very great indeed, for they contain within them some of the deepest and richest insights men have ever expressed in words.

Among these, Greek tragedy is probably the toughest nut to crack for beginning readers.

For one thing, in the ancient world three tragedies were presented at one time, the three often dealing with a common theme, but except in one case (the Oresteia of A...

For another, it is almost impossible to stage the plays mentally, since we know almost nothing about h...

For still another, the plays often are based on stories that were well known to their audiences but are know...

It is important to read them well, for they not only can tell us much about life as we still live it, but they also form a kind of literary framework for many other plays written much later—for example, Racine’s and O’Neill’s.

We have two bits of advice that may help.

The first is to remember that the essence of tragedy is time, or r...

There is no problem in any Greek tragedy that could not have been solved if there had been enough tim...

Decisions, choices have to be made in a moment, there is no time to think and weigh the consequences; and, since even tragic heroes are fallible—especially fallible, perhaps—the decisions are wrong. It is easy for us to see what should have been done, but would we have been able to see in time?...

The second bit of advice is this. One thing we do know about the staging of Greek plays is that the tragic actors wore buskins on their feet that elev...

The comparison between the size of the tragic protagonists, on the one hand, and the members of the chorus, on the other hand, was thus highly significant.

Therefore you should always imagine, when you read the words of the chorus, that the words are spoken by persons of your own stature; while the words spoken by the protagonists proceed from the mouths of giants, from personages who did not only seem, but actually were, larger than life.

The simplest definition of poetry (in the somewhat limited sense implied by the title of this section) is that it is what poets write.

Whatever may be the origin of the poetic impulse, poetry, for us, consists of words, and what is more, of words that are arranged in a more or less orderly and disciplined way.

Many people believe that they cannot read lyric poetry—especially modern poetry. They think that it is often difficult, obscure, complex, and that it demands so much attention, so much work on their part, that it is not worthwhile.

We would say two things. First, lyric poetry, even modern poetry, does not always demand as much work as you may think if you go about reading it in the right way.

Second, it is often worth whatever effort you are ...

A good poem can be worked at, re-read, and thought about over and over for the rest of your life. You will never stop finding new things in it, new pleasures and delights, a...

The first rule to follow in reading a lyric is to read it through without stopping, whether you think you understand it or not.

In fact, the trouble so many people seem to have in reading poems, especially the difficult modern ones, stems from their unawareness of this first rule of reading them.

But any good lyric poem has a unity. Unless we read all of it, and all at once, we cannot comprehend its unity.

In particular, the essence of a poem is almost never to be found in its first line, or even in its first stanza. It is to be found only in the whole, and not conclusively in any part.

The second rule for reading lyrics is this: Read the poem through again—but read it out loud.

You will find, as you read the poem out loud, that the very act of speaking the words forces you to understand them better.

And the rhythm of the poem, and its rhymes, if it has them, will help you to understand by making you place the emphasis where it belongs. Finally, you will be able to open yourself to the poem, and let it work on you, as it should.

You do not come to terms with a poem; but you must discover the key words.

You discover them not primarily by an act of grammatical discernment, however, but by an act of rhetorical discernment.

Why do certain words pop out of the poem and stare you in the face? Is it because the rhythm marks them? Or the rhyme? Or are the words repeated? Do several stanzas seem to be about the same ideas; if so, do these ideas form any kind of sequence? Anythi...

In most good lyrics there is some kind of conflict. Sometimes two antagonists—either individual people, or images, or ideas—are named, and then...

For example, a large number of great lyric poems—perhaps even the majority of them—are about the conflict between love and time, between life and death, between the beauty o...