How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J summary

Introduction

How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren What's in it for me? Become a reading machine. Did you struggle to read the assigned texts at school?

Probably. We might love to read for pleasure, but when it comes to working on books and articles that don't interest us, we have to fight hard to keep engaged. It doesn't have to be this way. There is a method for reading even the driest of books quickly and efficiently.

A cult hit in the one thousand nine hundred and forty s, How to Read a Book can help you get more from your reading, whether you need to bone up quickly on that novel for English class, or learn about that new marketing text for work. In this summary, you'll find out why you can't be a passive reader, why the Table of Contents is your friend, and why even the brightest of people might need to keep a dictionary handy. In order to get more from books, you need to read actively and learn some basic reading rules. Do you take any moment you can to get lost in a good novel?

When we're reading for the sheer joy of it, there's no real need to change our approach to it. There are occasions, though, when we don't read just for our own entertainment and we need to understand and select information from a text quickly. Before we look at some tips and tricks on how to do this best, let's first see what it means to be an effective reader.

Reading Basics

First, the basics. The first thing you should know is that reading is an active task, not a passive one. You can see it like a ball game where one party throws the ball and the other party has to make an effort in order to catch it.

That is, the catcher or reader has to make an effort in order to understand what the author, who throws the ball, is trying to convey. This means that you can't be lazy and expect all the relevant information to immediately flow to you. Getting what you want from a book requires work and, just as with any other activity, if you want to become a highly proficient reader, you must learn and practice the skills involved. In the ball game example, you become a skilled catcher if you know the rules of the game, and if you commit to practicing.

So, what must you do to become a good reader? Master different levels of reading, from the more superficial to the involved and analytical. The following chapters will offer you some guidelines on how to achieve this.