1-Page Summary

How to Read a Book is the classic guide to reading effectively. It teaches how to understand the crux of a book within 15 minutes, how to analyze a book intelligently, and how to synthesize ideas from multiple books. Reading is an active activity, not a passive one—so if you read a lot of books, it makes sense to learn how to increase the value of your reading.

Part 1: The Premise of How to Read

According to the authors, after you learn phonics as a child and go through high school English, no one really teaches you how to read intelligently. College courses rarely touch on this, and the workforce even less so. As a result, plenty of adults read at an elementary level—not in the sense of having a limited vocabulary, but in absorbing the value of a book efficiently. (Shortform note: This holds just as true today as it did in 1972. One study found that 43 million American adults have “low literacy skills.”)

The authors believe there are two types of active reading (note that this does not include reading for pure entertainment, which is a relatively passive pursuit in terms of cognitive effort):

  1. Reading to collect facts. The authors argue that if you understand the book completely without exerting any extra effort, then you have only gained information from the book—you haven’t improved your understanding. You’ve simply added to your existing collection of facts on the subject.
  2. Reading for comprehension. When you read for comprehension, the authors believe that you won’t glean all the meaning from the book on the very first try. Instead of just adding to your collection of facts on a subject, the book will challenge you to find new ways to think about those facts or relate them to one another. You’ll begin to think about not just what is the case, but why it is the case. This type of reading expands your understanding and increases your reading skills.

In 19th Century America, All Reading Was “Reading for Comprehension”

The authors believe that “reading for comprehension” is a unique type of reading, distinct from reading for information. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, author Neil Postman argues that classifying “reading for comprehension” as just one category of reading is a modern idea because, in the past, there were no alternatives: All reading was for the purpose of comprehension because print was the most accessible medium for sharing ideas. In other words, reading was such a critical part of early American society that deeply understanding what you read was crucial.

How did “reading for comprehension” evolve into its own, separate task? Postman argues that two inventions changed the nature of reading in 19th century America, the first being the telegraph. The invention of the telegraph made it possible to communicate short bursts of information across great distances. Over time, the country evolved from a slow, print-centered intellectual culture to one that valued speed and quantity of information over relevance. Reading The Federalist Papers and thoughtfully debating the contents with your family was out—glossing over eye-catching headlines of news from around the world was in.

The development of modern photography also contributed to this new hunger for information to be delivered in quick, easy-to-digest formats. Instead of slogging through a long book about life in another culture, you could glance at a photograph and immediately get a sense of another world, without all the mental effort of reading. Now, two centuries later, we spend our free time scrolling image-based social media platforms. For better or for worse, “reading for comprehension” has become an entirely separate activity that is no longer a requirement to participate in daily life.

4 Key Questions to Answer While You’re Reading

The authors assert that if you read for comprehension, you will be able to answer four key questions about the book:

Ideally, the authors recommend you make a habit of asking these questions as you read. Doing this feels clunky at first, but you need to train each skill separately before doing it all subconsciously.

A Fifth Question: The Limits of a Good Idea

As you read, you may also want to ask a crucial question not posed by the authors: “What are the limits of the author’s good ideas? W

hat would happen if everyone followed this advice all the time?” It’s rare that an idea is applicable in all situations.

For example, in Smarter Faster Better, author Charles Duhigg advocates for probabilistic thinking, a decision-making strategy that requires thinking up all the possible outcomes of a given choice and then calculating the likelihood of each of those outcomes. Duhigg argues that thinking probabilistically will increase the accuracy of your predictions and lead to more productive choices. However, if everyone thought probabilistically all the time, we’d lose the ability to be spontaneous or to respond instinctively to any situation. If we thought probabilistically about whether to slam on the brakes when a dog runs into the road, the extra thinking time could have terrible consequences. Therefore, Duhigg’s good idea clearly has a limit.

“Too much of a good thing” is a particular concern in self-help books. For example, in The Game, author Neil Strauss presents tips on flirting with women from several self-proclaimed master pickup artists. However, many of these tips—like “negging” (insulting a woman with a backhanded compliment)—could easily escalate into abusive behavior. Thus, if you’re reading a book in the self-help or how-to genre, “what are the limits of this idea?” may be an especially important question to ask.

Part 2: Elementary and Inspectional Reading

So far in this guide, we’ve learned the purpose of reading well and discussed how to choose which books to read. In the next two parts, we’ll cover the first three levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, and analytical, in that order.

The authors describe elementary reading as the pure mechanical reading of text and comprehension of what the symbols literally mean. It’s the most basic form of reading that we learn to do as a child. (As an adult, you revisit the difficulties of elementary reading when you first try to read in a foreign language.) (Shortform note: The authors spend considerable time discussing the specific steps of learning to read at an elementary level. However, if you’re reading this guide, you’ve already mastered those steps. Therefore, we’ve condensed this chapter to just the information that is relevant to readers who are proficient in elementary reading and want to improve their higher-level reading skills.)

After elementary reading, the second level of reading is inspectional. According to the authors, inspectional reading is a skimming of the book to understand its main points and its structure. It aims to gain the best understanding of the book in a limited time (the authors advise setting a target for 15 minutes to comprehend a 300-page book). (Shortform note: Adler and Van Doren recommend inspectional reading as a precursor to analytical reading. However, if you don’t plan to come back and read the book analytically, you can make the most of reading it inspectionally by putting the book’s ideas into practice immediately in your daily life. That way, you’ll get the maximum benefit from the information even without a deep, analytical reading.)

Techniques for Inspectional Reading

Part 3: Analytical Reading

According to the authors, the aim of analytical reading is to, without imposing any time restraints, gain the best understanding of the book possible. Not only should you aim to understand what is being said, but you should also develop a personal opinion about its validity. (Shortform note: In addition to forming a judgment about the book’s validity, you might think about what parts of the book were most impactful and will stay with you over time.)

Adler and Van Doren believe the first step of analytical reading is to understand the author’s goals in writing the book. This requires finding out what problems the author is trying to solve and what questions the book tries to answer. (Shortform note: This task is a bit more complicated for fiction works, as different readers can come away with different understandings of the author’s intent.)

How to Find Keywords

In the step above, you figured out what questions the author is trying to answer. Now, Adler and Van Doren argue you need to comprehend what the book is actually saying, and what arguments the author makes in relation to her questions. To find what the book says, Adler and Van Doren advise looking for keywords. Keywords are meaningful words or phrases that are used often and convey a wealth of information. As a reader, you need to understand the keywords of the author and what is meant by them. This is especially important because the same word can mean different things to different authors.

(Shortform note: Be sure to look for keywords early in the revision process, otherwise you may misunderstand the author’s arguments in the rest of the book. For example, in A Brief History of Time, author and physicist Stephen Hawking uses the word “theory” in a very specific, scientific way, not in the colloquial sense as a simple synonym for the word “idea.” To really understand the rest of the book, it’s crucial to understand how Hawking defines that keyword.)

How do you find keywords? Adler and Van Doren provide two clues to identifying the most important terms in a book. First, a word is probably important if the author deliberately uses it differently than other writers do (particularly if the author makes a point to explain why those other writers’ definitions are incorrect or incomplete). Second, if you struggle to understand how an author is using a particular word, that’s a sign that the word is important: Authors frequently use keywords in unique ways to express their most important (and, often, most complex) ideas.

More Tips on How to Find Keywords

The process of finding keywords in a text can differ based on the type of text and the way you approach it. For example, shorter works like articles often feature keywords in predefined places—such as the first sentence of the article, the last sentence of the first paragraph, and in any repeated phrase throughout the piece.

Additionally, if you already know something about what you’re reading, that can help you identify the keywords. For example, if you’re reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, you probably know that Darwin’s ideas were part of the theory of evolution, so you’ll know to keep an eye out for “evolution” as a keyword. You can also look for synonyms and related words or phrases, like “heredity” or “survival of the fittest.”

How to Find Key Sentences

After identifying keywords, Adler and Van Doren recommend finding the author’s leading propositions in her most important sentences. Important sentences express parts of the author’s argument. Here are some tips on how to find them:

Finding Key Sentences in the Digital Age

In the modern era, there are other, high-tech ways of identifying important sentences that Adler and Van Doren couldn’t imagine in 1972. For example, computer programmers in the field of natural language processing have developed algorithms capable of reading digital text and automatically identifying key terms and sentences. This is especially impressive because the program is partly based on the frequency of a given word in a text, but it has to distinguish between common-but-not-useful words (like “and” or “the”) and the actual keywords of the text. Once the program identifies the keywords based on frequency, it scans every single sentence and highlights those sentences with higher proportions of keywords—which is essentially a computerized version of the process that Adler and Van Doren recommend.

Criticizing a Book

So far in the reading process, if you’ve been following Adler and Van Doren’s advice, you’ve been absorbing what the author has to say without criticism or judgment. However, once you fully understand a book, you have a new responsibility as a reader: to argue with it.

According to Adler and Van Doren, when criticizing, your job is to determine which of her questions the author has answered, which she has not, and decide if the author knew she had failed to answer them. (Shortform note: As you begin this process, you may also want to think about the subject as a whole and ask yourself: Are there any important ideas the author didn’t mention? Did she leave anything out? If so, how would that missing information change your impression of her argument?)

Complete Your Understanding First

Much like having a conversation with an author, Adler and Van Doren contend that you need to give the author the chance to express herself fully before passing judgment. If you interrupted the author at each sentence to say she’s wrong, you’re not having a conversation that can lead to learning. Therefore, you must finish the other tasks above (outlining the book, defining main terms, understanding the main arguments) before criticizing. Otherwise, your criticism will be meaningless because you won’t be criticizing the author’s actual argument.

(Shortform note: You’ll need to use your own best judgment to decide if you fully understand the author’s arguments. However, if you’re new to the book’s subject, you should be especially cautious about deciding you understand because the less you know about a subject, the more likely you are to overestimate your understanding. This is the essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect.)

How to Criticize Well

In Adler and Van Doren’s view, criticizing a book means to comment, “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.”

When you’re criticizing an author, Adler and Van Doren caution against being overly contentious or combative. A discussion isn’t something to be won: It’s an opportunity to discover the truth. Remember that disagreement is an opportunity to learn something new. Here are some tips for keeping an open mind:

Resolving Difficult Conversations With the Author

Separating your emotional reaction to a book from your intellectual reaction and trying to take the author’s point of view isn’t always easy, especially if the author’s argument threatens an aspect of your life or your identity. In that situation, it may help to think of yourself as entering into a difficult conversation with the author.

In Difficult Conversations, authors Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen offer advice for navigating these types of conversations:

Part 4: Comparative Reading

The first three levels of reading all focus on reading a singular text. Now, we’ll talk about applying those analytical skills across a multitude of texts. Adler and Van Doren call this “syntopical reading.” “Syntopical” is a neologism Adler’s Encyclopedia Britannica team invented; for simplicity, we’ll call this type of reading “comparative” reading.

Comparative reading aims to compare books and authors to one another, to model dialogues between authors that may not be in any one of the books. (Shortform note: In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, author Thomas C. Foster describes “intertextuality,” which is the common references and themes that exist across fiction books. Reading literature with an intertextual lens is similar to reading expository books comparatively.)

The ultimate aim is to understand all the conflicting viewpoints relating to a subject. Here are the major steps of comparative reading according to the authors. (Shortform note: Adler and Van Doren list these as a set of five steps, each containing many sub-steps. For clarity, we’ve expanded the list so that each step is one distinct action. See our full guide for specific tips on reading books in various genres, like fiction, science, and philosophy.)

1. Create a total bibliography of works that may be relevant to your subject.

2. Inspect all of the books on your bibliography to decide which are relevant to your subject, and to better define the subject.

3. Go through each book on your list and mark specific chapters or passages you intend to use.

4. Develop a set of common terms and rephrase each author’s argument in that language.

5. Develop a set of questions that each author provides answers to.

6. Get a sense of the complexity of the issues.

7. Order the questions and issues to throw maximum light on the subject.

The authors suggest omitting imaginative works from comparative reading, because the propositions are obscured by plot and are rarely explicitly attributed to the author (a character’s speech could be satirical). (Shortform note: Including fiction in a comparative project is complicated indeed, but may still be valuable. For example, reading only historical accounts of 18th century English and Irish politics without reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (or of ancient Greece without reading the works of Homer or Sophocles) would be a major omission, despite the influence of fiction.)

Comparative Reading vs. Literature Review

In academic settings, literature reviews are a common undertaking. Literature reviews are similar to comparative reading projects in that the goal is to gain a wide understanding of what other thinkers have to say about a certain subject. Researchers conducting literature reviews often complete extra steps that Adler and Van Doren don’t mention in their discussion of comparative reading; however, these steps might be useful for comparative reading projects. For example:

Shortform Introduction

How to Read a Book is the classic guide to reading effectively. It teaches how to understand the crux of a book within 15 minutes, how to analyze a book intelligently, and how to synthesize ideas from multiple books. Reading is an active activity, not a passive one—so if you read a lot of books, it makes sense to learn how to read better and increase the value of your reading.

About the Authors

Mortimer J. Adler was a philosopher, Columbia professor, Chairman of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and prolific author of more than 50 books (imagine how many he must have read!). Adler wrote on a range of subjects including Aristotelian philosophy, liberal arts education, capitalism, religion, and morality. As Chairman, he oversaw the publishing of Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World series and went on to found the Great Books Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting literacy and critical thinking.

Charles Van Doren was a writer, editor, educator, and eventual vice president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. He is the author of six books and the editor of five (many of which were co-edited by Adler). Van Doren came from a literary family—his mother was a novelist and both his father and uncle were Pulitzer Prize-winning authors—and was a polymath, holding advanced degrees in both astrophysics and English.

In the late 1950s, Van Doren was a contestant on “Twenty-One,” a popular quiz show. He ultimately won over $129,000 (which equates to over a million dollars today). However, rumors of fraud prompted a Congressional investigation, and Van Doren ultimately admitted that the network gave him the questions and answers in advance. The 1994 movie “Quiz Show” is based on his involvement in the scandal.

The Book’s Publication

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

How to Read a Book was originally published in 1940 with the subtitle, “The Art of Getting a Liberal Education.” Mortimer J. Adler was the sole author of the first edition. This guide, however, covers the revised 1972 edition, which features a significant content expansion (the book is divided into four parts, only one of which was present in the first edition) and a new subtitle: “The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” The first edition of How to Read a Book was Adler’s ninth book; the 1972 edition was Van Doren’s second book. Both authors wrote extensively on the importance of books and reading (including Van Doren’s The Joy of Reading); however, How to Read a Book remains the most popular book in both authors’ bibliographies.

The Book’s Context

Historical Context

In the preface to this edition of How to Read a Book, Adler described the changes he observed in American society that prompted him to revisit the book 32 years after its original publication. First, the percentage of young people earning college degrees rose significantly during that time period (in part due to the passage of the GI Bill, which financed college education for veterans returning from World War II). Additionally, in 1970, the federal government reiterated the importance of reading when the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare announced a national “Right to Read” effort designed to improve reading education for children under age 10. Adler took this educational boom as a sign that reading well was more important than ever and decided to revamp his 1940 classic.

Intellectual Context

How to Read a Book was one of the first books to explicitly teach the art of reading for comprehension rather than speed. Its modern successors include Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Steve Leveen’s The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, and Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why, all of which focus primarily on works of fiction (unlike How to Read a Book, which focuses on techniques for reading nonfiction books).

The Book’s Impact

How to Read a Book became an immediate bestseller when it was first published in 1940. The 1972 revised edition has been consistently successful and was most recently republished in 2014.

In 1997, Adler wrote a companion volume to How to Read a Book entitled How to Speak How to Listen, in which he adapts his methodology for close reading to the art of spoken conversation.

The Book’s Strengths and Weaknesses

Critical Reception

The 1940 edition of How to Read a Book was critically well-received; upon the book’s release, one reviewer called it, “a serious and valuable invitation to an enrichment of personal life.”

Reviews of the 1972 revised and updated edition, on the other hand, are much more mixed. A 1972 New York Times review particularly exemplifies this tension—the reviewer said he couldn’t decide “whether to praise it or damn it.” He concedes that How to Read a Book fills an important gap in popular education (by teaching the reader how to get the most from a book) but also argues that the book is overly highbrow and ignores the quality of modern fiction. In the end, the reviewer recommends the book to those who are just beginning to read critically; however, he advises those who are already well-versed in the art of reading to “drop this book down the incinerator, throw it on the compost heap, get rid of it; then fumigate the premises and start reading as you please.”

Modern reviews of the 1972 edition are equally mixed—many praise the book for its unique approach to analytical reading but argue that it’s now thoroughly out of date and “boring.”

Commentary on the Book’s Approach

Nearly every idea in How to Read a Book is thoroughly fleshed out. Adler and Van Doren explain what their techniques are, why they’re important, and how to use them. Thus, the authors meet their goal of helping the reader wring more understanding out of the books they read.

To a modern reader, it may seem as though the authors give undue attention to some points that aren’t critical to the main argument; this is likely because society has changed significantly in the decades since the book was published. For example, the authors analyze the strengths and weaknesses of speed-reading in depth because speed-reading was part of the intellectual zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s. However, speed-reading has fallen in popularity, so the argument has lost some cultural relevance.

Commentary on the Book’s Organization

How to Read a Book is organized into four parts. Part One covers the mechanics of “elementary reading” and tips for “inspectional reading” (which is a form of in-depth skimming). Part Two covers “analytical reading,” which is the authors’ method of wringing as much understanding as possible out of a single book. Part Three offers specific advice for reading books of different genres (like philosophy, poetry, and science). Finally, Part Four covers “comparative reading,” which is the art of reading a wide variety of books on a single subject in order to fully understand that subject. The book ends with a recommended reading list.

This four-part structure is somewhat confusing because the four parts don’t directly map onto the four “levels of reading” that the authors reference throughout the book (with elementary reading and inspectional reading being compressed into one part), nor do they map onto the “four basic questions” that the authors claim a reader should ask about every book.

Our Approach in This Guide

Our guide to How to Read a Book contains six parts. Part 1 covers the basics of what Adler and Van Doren believe constitutes “good reading.” Parts 2 to 4 describe the principles of elementary, inspectional, and analytical reading, in that order. Part 5 contains specific advice for reading different genres analytically, such as fiction, science, and philosophy. Finally, Part 6 describes comparative reading, which Adler and Van Doren argue is the highest form of reading. Throughout the guide, we’ll examine the authors’ advice through a 21st-century lens to see how well it applies to modern readers.

Part 1: The Premise of How to Read

If you read a lot of books a year, then it makes sense to spend a few hours learning how to double the value from your reading. That’s the point of How to Read a Book.

According to the authors, after you learn phonics as a child and go through high school English, no one really teaches you how to read intelligently. College courses rarely touch on this, and the workforce even less so. As a result, plenty of adults read at an elementary level—not in the sense of having a limited vocabulary, but in absorbing the value of a book efficiently. (Shortform note: This holds just as true today as it did in 1972. One study found that 43 million American adults have “low literacy skills.”)

What Good Reading Is

While some consider reading to be passive in nature, Adler and Van Doren argue that reading for the purpose of comprehension is an active pursuit. This is a bit like the difference between merely hearing someone’s words and actively listening with the goal of comprehending what the words mean. If you read passively (without effort), you might register the surface level of what is said, but you won’t truly understand what the author is trying to say. (Shortform note: Studies show that reading for comprehension requires significant cognitive effort, but that this type of reading isn’t the most demanding—reading with the goal of revising the text requires even more mental effort.)

The authors believe there are two types of active reading (note that this does not include reading for pure entertainment, which is a relatively passive pursuit in terms of cognitive effort):

  1. Reading to collect facts. The authors argue that if you understand the book completely without exerting any extra effort, then you have only gained information from the book—you haven’t improved your understanding. You’ve simply added to your existing collection of facts on the subject.
  2. Reading for comprehension. When you read for comprehension, the authors believe that you won’t glean all the meaning from the book on the very first try. Instead of just adding to your collection of facts on a subject, the book will challenge you to find new ways to think about those facts or relate them to one another. You’ll begin to think about not just what is the case, but why it is the case. This type of reading expands your understanding and increases your reading skills.

However, we don’t live in a world that’s conducive to understanding.

The authors feel that the best books challenge your reading ability and force you to grow as a reader. They also believe that to be well-read is not to have read a large number of books, but to have a high-quality understanding of good books. (Shortform note: There are many ways to define being “well-read.” The authors insist you can be well-read without being widely read, but they don’t attach limits to this idea. Can a reader have an intimate understanding of two great books and be considered well-read? Alternatively, would they use the term “well-read” to describe someone well-versed in the classics of just one genre, country, or subject?)

In 19th Century America, All Reading Was “Reading for Comprehension”

As we noted earlier, the authors believe that “reading for comprehension” is a unique type of reading, distinct from reading for information. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, author Neil Postman argues that classifying “reading for comprehension” as just one category of reading is a modern idea because, in the past, there were no alternatives: All reading was for the purpose of comprehension because print was the most accessible medium for sharing ideas. In other words, reading was such a critical part of early American society that deeply understanding what you read was crucial.

How did “reading for comprehension” evolve into its own, separate task? Postman argues that two inventions changed the nature of reading in 19th century America, the first being the telegraph. The invention of the telegraph made it possible to communicate short bursts of information across great distances. Over time, the country evolved from a slow, print-centered intellectual culture to one that valued speed and quantity of information over relevance. Reading The Federalist Papers and thoughtfully debating the contents with your family was out—glossing over eye-catching headlines of news from around the world was in.

The development of modern photography also contributed to this new hunger for information to be delivered in quick, easy-to-digest formats. Instead of slogging through a long book about life in another culture, you could glance at a photograph and immediately get a sense of another world, without all the mental effort of reading. Now, two centuries later, we spend our free time scrolling image-based social media platforms. For better or for worse, “reading for comprehension” has become an entirely separate activity that is no longer a requirement to participate in daily life.

4 Key Questions to Answer While You’re Reading

The authors assert that if you read for understanding, you will be able to answer four key questions about the book:

Ideally, the authors recommend you make a habit of asking these questions as you read. Doing this feels clunky at first, but you need to train each skill separately before doing it all subconsciously.

A Fifth Question: The Limits of a Good Idea

As you read, you may also want to ask a crucial question not posed by the authors: “What are the limits of the author’s good ideas? What would happen if everyone followed this advice all the time?” It’s rare that an idea is applicable in all situations.

For example, in Smarter Faster Better, author Charles Duhigg advocates for probabilistic thinking, a decision-making strategy that requires thinking up all the possible outcomes of a given choice and then calculating the likelihood of each of those outcomes. Duhigg argues that thinking probabilistically will increase the accuracy of your predictions and lead to more productive choices. However, if everyone thought probabilistically all the time, we’d lose the ability to be spontaneous or to respond instinctively to any situation. If we thought probabilistically about whether to slam on the brakes when a dog runs into the road, the extra thinking time could have terrible consequences. Therefore, Duhigg’s good idea clearly has a limit.

“Too much of a good thing” is a particular concern in self-help books. For example, in The Game, author Neil Strauss presents tips on flirting with women from several self-proclaimed master pickup artists. However, many of these tips—like “negging” (insulting a woman with a backhanded compliment)—could easily escalate into abusive behavior. Thus, if you’re reading a book in the self-help or how-to genre, “what are the limits of this idea?” may be an especially important question to ask.

Techniques to Understand a Book

We’ll cover far more suggestions on how to read well later in this guide, but here are a few strategies Adler and Van Doren recommend, most of which relate to how you should mark up a book while reading:

(Shortform note: Adler believes so strongly in the importance of marking up books that he published a pamphlet called “How to Mark a Book'' in 1941, one year after publishing the first edition of How to Read a Book. In it, he offers a tip for taking notes on books if you’d rather not write directly on the pages: Write your notes on paper that is slightly smaller than the book pages (so the edges don’t stick out of the book), then store them in the book itself.)

The Four Levels of Reading

Adler and Van Doren divide the act of reading into four levels, each increasing in difficulty and complexity. Here they are at a high level (we’ll discuss them in detail later in this guide):

Other Ways to Divide Reading Levels

The authors’ way of dividing reading skill into a leveled system isn’t the only way. For example, educators commonly use a three-level system to grade reading comprehension. In this system, Level 1 consists of what the authors would call “elementary” and “inspectional” reading. It’s the process of reading and understanding the literal words on the page. Level 2 is the beginning of what the authors would call “analytical” reading—readers begin to interpret the meaning of the text and answer “why?” questions about what they’ve read. The third and final level in this system, Level 3, also falls under analytical reading. At this level, readers form judgments about what they’ve read, decide whether they agree or disagree with the author, and evaluate the work’s impact on their own lives.

Similarly, there is another three-part leveling system that teachers sometimes use. In that system, Level 1 is still about the literal words on the page. Level 2, however, brings in what Adler and Van Doren would call “syntopical” reading, in which students begin making connections between what they’re reading, other books, and even their own life experiences. In Level 3, students refocus on the text at hand and begin looking for rhetorical devices (such as repetition and juxtaposition).

On What Books to Read

According to the authors, the vast majority of books will not strain your ability to read analytically. They deliver information that fits your current framework, or they are meant to be read for entertainment.

Then, there is a smaller class of books that can give you more than entertainment or information—they can actually help you live a better life. These are the books that you can read analytically, be deeply impacted by, but not necessarily feel compelled to reread once you finish them. (Shortform note: Beware—not every book that purports to teach you how to live well actually does. Many self-improvement books become popular because they are easy to read and sound like good ideas, not because they can actually help you live a different or better life.)

There is a final, highest class of books, perhaps fewer than a hundred, that you can return to over and over again and get something new out of them each time. The authors believe you should seek out these books, for they will teach you the most.

To identify these books, the authors suggest you consider the desert island question—which 10 books would you take with you if you could never read any book ever again? These are unique to us all, and you should start with the classics that interest you the most.

Consider Great Books Outside the Western Male Canon

As you read this guide, keep in mind that when Adler and Van Doren discuss “great books,” they’re referring exclusively to books in the Western canon. In an appendix, the authors acknowledge this and explain that they’ve chosen to stay within their own areas of expertise (this makes particular sense for Adler, who spearheaded the Great Books of the Western World program and is, therefore, a respected gatekeeper of the Western canon). Therefore, their recommended reading list does not feature any writers from other parts of the world. The 137 author list also features just two women: Jane Austen and George Eliot.

The classics of the Western canon are timeless for a reason. However, for modern readers, reading solely within the Western canon means missing out on the chance to read authors with vastly different perspectives. To expand your literary horizons, consider reading classic works of world literature like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Additionally, you might wish to explore classic works written by women like Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God or Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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Exercise: Reflect on Your Reading Life

If you’re reading this guide to How to Read a Book, chances are you enjoy reading great books. Reflect on your approach to reading below.

Part 2: Elementary Reading

So far in this guide, we’ve learned the purpose of reading well and discussed how to choose which books to read. In the next three parts, we’ll cover the first three levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, and analytical, in that order.

The authors describe elementary reading as the pure mechanical reading of text and comprehension of what the symbols literally mean. It’s the most basic form of reading that we learn to do as a child. (As an adult, you revisit the difficulties of elementary reading when you first try to read in a foreign language.) (Shortform note: The authors spend considerable time discussing the specific steps of learning to read at an elementary level. However, if you’re reading this guide, you’ve already mastered those steps. Therefore, we’ve condensed this chapter to just the information that is relevant to readers who are proficient in elementary reading and want to improve their higher-level reading skills.)

According to the authors, children learn to read quite magically. At some point words suddenly have real meaning to them. Science is not clear on how this happens. Children become more capable readers as they build vocabulary and infer meanings from context clues. (Shortform note: Some researchers believe reading comprehension has two key components: written language “decoding” skill and oral language comprehension. In other words, to read effectively, kids need to be able to translate squiggly lines on a page into a recognizable word they can say aloud and know the meaning of that word when they hear it. When both those components are in place, the metaphorical light turns on and children can suddenly get meaning from written language.)

A Note on Speed Reading

One way that adults revisit the basics of reading is through speed reading courses, which purport to teach them how to increase their reading speeds without sacrificing comprehension. According to the authors, a helpful component of speed reading is training your brain not to subvocalize (pronouncing each word in your head so that you can “hear” them in your mind). To practice this, the authors recommend this exercise: Use your hand to cover the text, and move your hand downward faster than you can currently read. Your brain will be forced to catch up.

However, after a point, reading faster necessarily trades off with comprehension. When speed reading helps you avoid spending time on texts that don’t deserve your analysis, this is good. But you wouldn’t want to speed read the Tao Te Ching.

More critical than speed reading, according to the authors, is being able to modulate your reading speed dynamically. Read certain types of texts (like fiction) faster than others that contain denser content, like science textbooks. Within a text, read key points more slowly than fluff to give yourself time to think through the logic.

Modern Science Supports Adler and Van Doren’s View of Speed Reading

The first edition of How to Read a Book contains no mention of speed reading, which wouldn’t be introduced to the American public for another 19 years. However, when Adler and Van Doren wrote the updated and revised How to Read a Book in 1972, speed reading was at the height of its popularity in the United States—even President John F. Kennedy was a vocal proponent of speed reading.

Adler and Van Doren were particularly concerned about the popularity of speed reading because they believed that, to a certain degree, speed reading and reading for comprehension are mutually exclusive. Modern science corroborates that claim—research shows that when readers double or triple their reading speed, comprehension suffers. This supports the authors’ points: When you merely need a surface-level understanding of a topic, speed reading is a helpful tool; however, if you want to truly wrap your mind around a complex idea, you’ll have no choice but to slow down.

Fortunately, there are some factors that can increase reading speed (albeit not to the extreme degrees that speed reading programs advertise) without sacrificing comprehension, such as:

Part 3: Inspectional Reading

After elemental reading, the second level of reading is inspectional. According to the authors, inspectional reading is a skimming of the book to understand its main points and its structure. It aims to gain the best understanding of the book in a limited time (the authors advise setting a target for 15 minutes to comprehend a 300-page book).

Adler and Van Doren argue that when most people read a book, they do so cover to cover. When you read a book in that way, you’re trying to understand what a book is about at the same time you are trying to understand what the author is saying. To contrast, if you start by skimming the entire book to get a sense of what it’s about before reading from the beginning, you’ll already be in the right headspace to process the information.

(Shortform note: Adler and Van Doren recommend inspectional reading as a precursor to analytical reading. However, if you don’t plan to come back and read the book analytically, you can make the most of reading it inspectionally by putting the book’s ideas into practice immediately in your daily life. That way, you’ll get the maximum benefit from the information even without a deep, analytical reading.)

How to Read Inspectionally

After reading inspectionally, the authors believe you should be able to answer these three questions:

(Shortform note: You may also want to answer, “How qualified is the author to write a book on this subject?” For example, a hit new business book by a relatively unknown author may be less reliable than a book by an established business leader like Sam Walton, founder of Walmart and Sam’s Club (and author of Made in America). This isn’t a hard and fast rule as good ideas can come from anyone, regardless of their external qualifications, but it can help you decide how much to buy into the author’s ideas.)

Techniques for Inspectional Reading

In school, you may have learned to look up new words or concepts as you read. However, the authors believe this will make you miss the book’s main points because you’re getting too caught up in individual words and ideas. Instead, they advise reading difficult books straight through, without pausing to look anything up. Even if you understand less than 50% of the information, this cursory reading will improve your comprehension the second time around, ultimately saving time.

Inspectional Reading Techniques Helped Obama Become the Most Well-Read President

Reading a difficult book straight through without pausing to look anything up is a familiar strategy for some well-read cultural icons. For example, in A Promised Land, former U.S. president Barack Obama describes how he relied on this technique while devouring classic books in high school. He’d circle words he didn’t know, finish the book, then go back and look those words up after reading.

This technique clearly works well for Obama, as he’s known as one of the most well-read American presidents in history and even releases an annual list of his favorite books (which, over the years, have included works like How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt and Factfulness by Hans Rosling, among many others).

In addition to making him well-read, Obama’s penchant for reading difficult books shaped him into a deft writer. In describing Obama’s first memoir, Dreams From My Father, one writer argued that “no other president has written a book that aspired to literature as clearly as Obama’s did.” This shows another benefit of reading well—it can improve your skill as a writer.

Categorizing a Book

When starting a book, Adler and Van Doren recommend figuring out what genre of book it is. This prepares you to customize your engagement with the particular type of text because you’ll want to treat a book from one genre differently from books of a different genre. For example, if you’re reading a science fiction novel, you might reasonably expect to be entertained; but if you’re reading a dense text on quantum physics, you might reasonably expect to encounter some equations and challenging ideas.

Here is the authors’ hierarchy of genres at a glance. We’ll describe each category in more detail below.

howtoreadabook_categories.png

The Limits of the Authors’ Classification System

The broad genre categories that the authors discuss may not be a practical way to categorize all nonfiction books. For example, according to Adler and Van Doren’s classifications, many social science books would fall under “philosophy” because they deal with interpersonal relationships, which are a visible and accessible phenomenon—but social science is a distinct discipline from philosophy.

We can compare the authors’ broad approach to more specific approaches to book classification. For example, Amazon organizes its “Books” department into 32 subcategories. That level of specificity might be more helpful for books that fall outside of strict science, history, and philosophy silos.

Additionally, the authors don’t break down the “fiction” category into further subcategories in their classification system. This implies that readers should have the same approach or set of expectations for every type of fiction, from epic fantasy sagas to poetry to short stories. However, later in the book, the authors acknowledge that that isn’t the case—they provide specific tips for approaching literature, poetry, and plays.

Finally, the authors assume there is a firm, universal distinction between theoretical and practical books. While they admit that there is an occasional overlap (as in, a book that is both practical and theoretical), this may be more common now than it was when Adler and Van Doren were writing. For example, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist appears thoroughly practical from the outset (the “how to” in the title points to this), but the book itself weaves in a heavy dose of theory, history, and even biography—none of which fall under the authors’ “practical” umbrella.

Writing a Skeleton Outline

Once you’ve skimmed through a book, the authors recommend writing out a very general overview of the book’s structure and information. They propose a methodical way to do this:

Some Books Resist the Skeleton Outline Approach

While Adler and Van Doren write as though all books have a single, unifying thesis, some reviewers believe that idea doesn't always apply. For example, the authors insist that this strategy applies to fiction as well as it does to expository books because the unified thesis of fiction is simply the main plotline. While this may be true for some stories (the authors cite the Odyssey as an example), it doesn’t work for books that are more character-driven than plot-driven.

For instance, if we summarized the main plot of The Catcher in the Rye in a single sentence, it would look something like, “Teenage protagonist Holden Caulfield gets expelled from school, wanders around New York City, meets up with various acquaintances, and reflects on life.” This surface-level treatment gives the reader very little useful information about the book because it ignores Holden’s internal journey as he grapples with a loss of innocence and feelings of alienation.

Part 4: Analytical Reading

So far in this guide, we’ve covered elementary and inspectional reading. Now, we’ll cover analytical reading, which is much more in-depth than the previous levels. According to the authors, the aim of analytical reading is to, without imposing any time restraints, gain the best understanding of the book possible. Not only should you aim to understand what is being said, but you should also develop a personal opinion about its validity. (Shortform note: In addition to forming a judgment about the book’s validity, you might think about what parts of the book were most impactful and will stay with you over time.)

Adler and Van Doren argue this isn’t necessary for every book, and it would be a waste of time for lower-quality books. If your goal with a book is simply information or entertainment, then you don’t need to do as thorough of a job analyzing it.

The authors argue that analytical reading consists of four components:

We’ll explore each of these facets in more detail below.

(Shortform note: Analytical reading is an important skill with applications beyond the realm of literature: Customer service employees who are skilled in analytical reading are better able to read and respond to all of a customer’s questions or complaints, even the implicit ones. For example, if a customer says, “My printer isn’t working, can you fix it?”, a skilled analytical reader knows the customer is not only asking if the company can fix her printer, but also how much it will cost.)

Understand the Author

Adler and Van Doren believe the first step of analytical reading is to understand the author’s goals in writing the book. This requires finding out what problems the author is trying to solve and what questions the book tries to answer. (Shortform note: This task is a bit more complicated for fiction works, as different readers can come away with different understandings of the author’s intent. We’ll learn some more concrete strategies for understanding fictional works in Part 5.)

According to the authors, different categories of books have different typical questions they try to answer. A theoretical book may question whether something is true while a practical book may ask, “What should we do about it?” (Shortform note: Some books may aim to answer both theoretical and practical questions. For example, Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race answers both, “Does systemic racism exist?” and “What should we do about it?”)

Find What the Book Says

In the step above, you figured out what questions the author is trying to answer. Now, Adler and Van Doren argue you need to comprehend what the book is actually saying, and what arguments the author makes in relation to her questions. Well-written books make it easier for the reader to comprehend their arguments using signposts, such as keywords and important sentences. Let’s discuss each in detail.

Keywords

To find what the book says, Adler and Van Doren advise looking for keywords. Keywords are meaningful words or phrases that are used often and convey a wealth of information. As a reader, you need to understand the keywords of the author and what is meant by them. This is especially important because the same word can mean different things to different authors. (Shortform note: Be sure to look for keywords early in the revision process, otherwise you may misunderstand the author’s arguments in the rest of the book. For example, in A Brief History of Time, author and physicist Stephen Hawking uses the word “theory” in a very specific, scientific way, not in the colloquial sense as a simple synonym for the word “idea.” To really understand the rest of the book, it’s crucial to understand how Hawking defines that keyword.)

How do you find keywords? Adler and Van Doren provide two clues to identifying the most important terms in a book. First, a word is probably important if the author deliberately uses it differently than other writers do (particularly if the author makes a point to explain why those other writers’ definitions are incorrect or incomplete). Second, if you struggle to understand how an author is using a particular word, that’s a sign that the word is important: Authors frequently use keywords in unique ways to express their most important (and, often, most complex) ideas.

More Tips on How to Find Keywords

The process of finding keywords in a text can differ based on the type of text and the way you approach it. For example, shorter works like articles often feature keywords in predefined places—such as the first sentence of the article, the last sentence of the first paragraph, and in any repeated phrase throughout the piece.

Additionally, if you already know something about what you’re reading, that can help you identify the keywords. For example, if you’re reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, you probably know that Darwin’s ideas were part of the theory of evolution, so you’ll know to keep an eye out for “evolution” as a keyword. You can also look for synonyms and related words or phrases, like “heredity” or “survival of the fittest.”

Most Important Sentences

After identifying keywords, Adler and Van Doren recommend finding the author’s leading propositions in her most important sentences. Important sentences express parts of the author’s argument. Here are some tips on how to find them:

Finding Key Sentences in the Digital Age

In the modern era, there are other, high-tech ways of identifying important sentences that Adler and Van Doren couldn’t imagine in 1972. For example, computer programmers in the field of natural language processing have developed algorithms capable of reading digital text and automatically identifying key terms and sentences. The program is partly based on the frequency of a given word in a text, but it has to distinguish between common-but-not-useful words (like “and” or “the”) and the actual keywords of the text. Once the program identifies the keywords based on frequency, it scans every single sentence and highlights those sentences with higher proportions of keywords—which is essentially a computerized version of the process that Adler and Van Doren recommend.

Identifying Propositions

Adler and Van Doren also advise unpacking complicated sentences to find all the propositions the author is making. For example, in The Body Keeps the Score, author and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk writes, “No matter how much insight and understanding we develop, the rational brain is basically impotent to talk the emotional brain out of its own reality.” We can break this sentence down into at least five propositions:

  1. Scientists have developed at least some understanding of this subject.
  2. There are two parts of the brain: the “rational brain” and the “emotional brain.”
  3. These two parts of the brain can be in conflict with one another, despite being part of the same physical organ.
  4. The rational brain may try to override the emotional brain.
  5. The rational brain cannot overpower or “turn off” the emotional brain when it is activated.

(Shortform note: Not all sentences that appear complex will actually be critical parts of an author’s argument. In some cases, authors may use overly complex language to mask a weak point in their argument. As you read, you’ll need to distinguish between necessary complexity and fluff.)

According to the authors, once you identify a proposition, you should rephrase it in the way most comfortable to you. This is the best way to verify that you understand it. If you can’t restate the author’s idea in your own words, you may have just memorized the words you’ve read rather than truly understood the idea. This can lead to misunderstandings if you encounter the same argument, phrased differently, in another book—you may think you’re reading a brand new idea when you’re really reading another wording of an idea you’ve already read.

(Shortform note: To make sure your new understanding really sinks in, try writing down this restatement by hand rather than just thinking it through in your head or typing it on a keyboard. The physical act of writing things down on paper requires more brain connections than typing (as your brain is processing a more intense sensory experience as well as coordinating fine motor movements), and those extra connections aid your memory and understanding.)

This is especially helpful for comparative reading—different authors say the same thing in different words, and this will help you see how they agree and disagree. (Shortform note: One example of this is the way different authors discuss the racist idea that people of a certain race are genetically superior to people of another race. In Biased, author Jennifer Eberhardt labels this idea “scientific racism”; in How to Be an Antiracist, author Ibram X. Kendi calls the same idea “biological racism.” If you only think to search for one of these terms, you’d miss out on hearing the other author’s thoughts on this idea.)

Sequences of Sentences Form an Argument

According to Adler and Van Doren, until an author supports her principles with reasons, they are merely opinions. You must distinguish between genuine knowledge and mere opinion. (Shortform note: This isn’t always an easy task, especially in the era of “fake news,” in which both opinions and outright falsehoods are sometimes presented as fact. If you’re unsure whether an author is sharing genuine knowledge or merely her own opinion masked as objective fact, consider consulting independent fact-checking organizations, like FactCheck.org or Snopes.)

How to Use External Resources

As much as possible, the authors believe you should struggle with the book independently on a first pass. This will help you see the book’s main arguments, rather than getting mired in minutiae like looking up words you don’t know. Therefore, your job is to first understand the book as well as you can without outside assistance. Once you’ve gotten as far as you can on your own, you can consult external resources to help you.

When you use an external resource, understand 1) what you hope to get from consulting it, and 2) the limitations of the resource. Here is how Adler and Van Doren recommend using external resources, and, where relevant, these sources’ limitations:

Dictionary

Encyclopedias

Summaries/abstracts

Commentaries/reviews

When External Resources Are Internal

In general, Adler and Van Doren recommend ignoring external resources until you’ve read the book all the way through and done your best to understand. However, some books make this task impossible because external resources are embedded into the text. For example, many modern editions of Shakespeare’s plays contain extensive notes, translations, and commentary either in footnotes or on the facing page of the text. This placement makes it almost for the reader to ignore this external information. The same phenomenon occurs in annotated versions of classic novels, which are increasingly popular.

Adler and Van Doren may not have anticipated the rise of annotated editions, as they make no mention of them in How to Read a Book. So how can a modern reader follow their advice?

How to Criticize a Book

So far in the reading process, if you’ve been following Adler and Van Doren’s advice, you’ve been absorbing what the author has to say without criticism or judgment. However, once you fully understand a book, you have a new responsibility as a reader: to argue with it.

According to Adler and Van Doren, when criticizing, your job is to determine which of her questions the author has answered and which she has not, and to decide if the author knew she had failed to answer them. (Shortform note: As you begin this process, you may also want to think about the subject as a whole and ask yourself: Are there any important ideas the author didn’t mention? Did she leave anything out? If so, how would that missing information change your impression of her argument?)

Complete Your Understanding First

Much like having a conversation with an author, Adler and Van Doren contend that you need to give the author the chance to express herself fully before passing judgment. If you interrupted the author at each sentence to say she’s wrong, you’re not having a conversation that can lead to learning. Therefore, you must finish the other tasks above (outlining the book, defining main terms, understanding the main arguments) before criticizing. Otherwise, your criticism will be meaningless because you won’t be criticizing the author’s actual argument.

(Shortform note: You’ll need to use your own best judgment to decide if you fully understand the author’s arguments. However, if you’re new to the book’s subject, you should be especially cautious about deciding you understand because the less you know about a subject, the more likely you are to overestimate your understanding. This is the essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect.)

The knowledge to understand the author may be present in other works by the author. (Shortform note: Adler and Van Doren cite the example of ancient authors like Aristotle and Plato, but this may also be true of modern authors of multiple books. For example, to fully understand Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile, you need to understand the ideas in his earlier work, The Black Swan.)

How to Criticize Well

In Adler and Van Doren’s view, criticizing a book means to comment, “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.”

When you’re criticizing an author, Adler and Van Doren caution against being overly contentious or combative. Remember that disagreement is an opportunity to learn something new. Here are some tips for keeping an open mind:

Resolving Difficult Conversations With the Author

Separating your emotional reaction to a book from your intellectual reaction and taking the author’s point of view isn’t always easy, especially if the author’s argument threatens an aspect of your life or your identity. In that situation, it may help to think of yourself as entering into a difficult conversation with the author.

In Difficult Conversations, authors Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen offer advice for navigating these types of conversations:

According to Adler and Van Doren, when you agree or disagree, you must justify and provide evidence for your conclusion. Without doing so, you’re merely expressing opinions—you’re not providing a substantive rebuttal to the author’s argument. (Shortform note: When you criticize an author’s argument, make sure you’re responding to the argument itself, not the author as a person. Not doing so is the “ad hominem” fallacy, or attempting to invalidate someone’s argument by attacking their character. This is a fallacy because even people we dislike are fully capable of saying true things.)

Likewise, you should distinguish between the author’s knowledge (arguments backed by evidence) and the author’s opinions (not backed by evidence). Be aware of your own assumptions and remember that your opponent is allowed to assume too, even if her assumptions don’t match yours. If the author asks you to take something for granted, you should do so. (Shortform note: Doing this allows you to evaluate the author’s argument to see if the conclusion follows from the premises; however, it’s possible to craft a logical argument based on faulty assumptions. In this case, you might conclude, “Based on the author’s assumptions, her conclusion is true—however, her assumptions don’t reflect reality.”)

Categories of Disagreement

If you disagree with the author, your criticism must fit into a set of categories:

According to Adler and Van Doren, if you can’t criticize the author’s information, logic, or completeness, then you must agree with the author’s conclusions.

Additional Categories of Disagreement

While Adler and Van Doren believe these four categories encompass all valid sources of disagreement with an author, there may be others: for example, moral disagreement. It’s possible to disagree on moral grounds with an author who is fully and accurately informed and makes a complete, logical argument. For example, an author who advocates for eugenics may have a sound logically sound argument, but a reader who believes that all human life is equally valuable can still disagree with the author’s conclusions.

Additionally, Adler and Van Doren’s categories assume that if part of the author’s argument is false, the author must be uninformed or misinformed. This takes the author in good faith and ignores the possibility that the author has more nefarious reasons for asserting something that is not true (for example, to increase personal profit). While this may not be a concern in the great books, it’s something modern readers may encounter in an increasingly partisan world. Adler and Van Doren’s four categories leave no room to disagree with an author who is willfully misleading the reader.

Exercise: Practice Analytical Reading

According to the authors, most of us don’t learn analytical reading in school, so this may be a brand new skill. Let’s practice it now.

Part 5: Reading Approaches for Different Genres

The authors believe that the principles of reading we’ve explored so far apply generally to all books and to expository books in particular. This section discusses different genres and gives specific guidance on how to adjust the four key questions to books in each genre:

We’ll cover practical books, imaginative literature, history, math and science, philosophy, and social sciences.

Practical Books

According to the authors, practical books concern how to do things better. They can be mainly comprised of rules (like Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Martyn Robert), principles that recommend certain rules be followed (like Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics), or somewhere in between. The practical book itself can’t solve its targeted problems directly. It requires action on the reader’s part. (Shortform note: Thus, you should be wary of books that claim they’ll “change your life.” This can be an effective marketing claim because a quick fix to life’s problems is so tantalizing; however, ultimately, the only person who can change your life is you, by applying the book’s principles.)

Note that practical books are not purely theoretical emotionless treatments like math proofs are. To be effective, the authors argue they contain rhetoric or propaganda that appeals to your feelings. Be wary of separating the arguments from the emotional language, but don’t be completely resistant—consider the author’s emotional arguments and open yourself accordingly.

Understand the context of the author. Know something about the author’s background and historical context, and how it affected the problems she saw and the rules she espouses. (Shortform note: This doesn’t just apply to older books. With the exponential pace of technological change in the 21st century, a book that’s just a few years old can quickly become outdated. For example, Steve Harvey’s 2009 dating guide, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, is already partly out of date because it makes no reference to online dating.)

The Four Questions

Emotional Language as a Tool of Persuasion

As we’ve noted above, Adler and Van Doren advise readers to look out for emotional appeals in practical books. This gives rise to another question to ask as you read: How is the author trying to impact your emotions through her language? This may be helpful to note because authors who use more emotive language may be trying to subtly persuade you to see things from their perspective.

These emotional appeals can be obvious (such as when Ibram X. Kendi describes his childhood classmate enduring racist treatment in How to Be an Antiracist) or more subtle. For example, consider these two sentences.

By changing just one word, we’ve turned a neutral sentence into one that passes negative judgment on the subject. If the author wanted to paint Samirah in an unflattering light without exposing her own bias, she could continue using subtle emotive language to influence readers’ perceptions. Thus, be on the lookout for emotive language and always ask yourself how the author is using such language to influence your understanding of the subject.

Imaginative Literature

Most of the principles so far apply to expository writing, where the aim is to convey information or lead to action. The authors believe that the goal of imaginative literature is different: to convey an experience. Thus, as a reader, you should open yourself to being emotionally affected. Allow the book to move you. Only then can you fairly judge the merit of the work. (Shortform note: Some writers may have a higher goal beyond simply conveying an experience—their purpose is to increase our empathy for others and show us that a better world is possible.)

The authors recommend judging imaginative works by how well they reflect reality: not necessarily in the details (as science fiction or fantasy violate this) but rather in whether what is being said rings true—characterization, how characters respond to events, whether themes are revealed that reflect your experiences. (Shortform note: Keep in mind that this is a highly subjective set of criteria. What rings true for you may be very different from what rings true for others. Instead of thinking about whether the book reflects your immediate experience, look for universal themes that everyone can relate to, like love, loss, and coming of age.)

According to Adler and Van Doren, reading imaginative works should still be active and critical. When you say you like or dislike a fictional work, you should articulate why, and what is good or bad about the book. (Shortform note: Again, the authors assume that you’re reading for the purpose of understanding. However, if you’re reading for pure entertainment, you should still articulate what you did and didn’t like about the book, if only for the purpose of finding similar books to read for entertainment. For example, if you recognize that you enjoyed how the author wrote from a first-person point of view, you might deliberately seek out other books with that style of narration.)

The Four Questions:

How to Read Fiction Analytically

While Adler and Van Doren assert that their analytical reading approach works as well for fiction as it does for expository books, some reviewers disagree: They feel that applying this method to fiction is too big a stretch because it ignores the complexities of literary theory and criticism.

We can look to Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor for guidance on how to read fiction analytically, such as:

Types of Imaginative Literature

Stories/Novels

Plays

Poetry

History

According to the authors, history has a greater impact on people’s actions today than any other type of work. History shows the actions of people in the past, making it less imposing for you to repeat them (in the case of good achievements) or avoid their mistakes. The way to read history is not just to learn what happened, but also to discover the commonalities between people across time. This will help illuminate certain universal truths of human nature. For example, while readers of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl may not be able to identify with her specific situation (hiding from the Nazis), they may empathize with Anne’s description of the loneliness of adolescence and feeling misunderstood.

Adler and Van Doren assert that accuracy is always an issue in historical works. It’s hard enough in a modern-day court to prove that anything happened, with live witnesses. Historical works try to establish that something happened in the past with no live witnesses to question. Historians must infer what happened from source material, and often have to impose patterns and infer motivations. (Shortform note: You may also find it useful to think about how reliable the source material is. For example, an author writing a biography of Abraham Lincoln will have access to ample primary sources (such as letters written in Lincoln’s own hand). On the other hand, an author writing a biography of Homer will have much more difficulty—he lived so long ago that there are almost no surviving primary sources about his life. As such, what information we have is all second-hand and therefore less reliable.)

Therefore, according to the authors, you should always be on the lookout for bias as you read history. Ask yourself: What is the author trying to prove, and to whom? Is she qualified to report on these particular events? You should also read multiple historical discussions of the same event. The more you read, the more the various authors’ biases will cancel each other out, and you’ll get a sense of the core issues on which they all agree.

The Four Questions

How (and Why) Historians Get Things Wrong

According to modern historians, Adler and Van Doren are right to urge caution when reading historical books, not only because of the bias historians can show, but also because historians can often get things completely wrong—sometimes directly because of this bias. For example, for centuries, historians constructed an image of the Vikings as an all-male fighting force, and, based on this bias, assumed that a skeleton of a Viking leader discovered in Sweden was male. However, in 2017, an osteologist analyzing the skeleton realized the warrior was actually female.

According to philosopher Alex Rosenberg, alongside bias, another reason historians are so often wrong about history is that they force complex historical events into a cohesive narrative. We expect stories to make logical sense, so historians often ignore important evidence or draw connections that don’t exist in order to make their historical stories make sense.

This isn’t deliberate deception—in fact, organizing random events into cohesive narratives is a universal subconscious tendency. In his landmark book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls this “the narrative fallacy.”

Types of Historical Works

Biographies

Current Events

Math and Science

According to the authors, historical math and science works tend to be more accessible than people think because 1) historically, they were written for broad readership, and 2) they tend to clarify upfront their terms and propositions. On the other hand, the authors argue that modern works tend to be written for an audience of experts, since fields have become deeply specialized. Thus they contain jargon and require prior training. The techniques in this book don’t apply as well in these cases. (Shortform note: This may no longer be true for modern math and science books. For example, Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics and Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene are both easily accessible, even for readers who are new to those subjects.)

When reading math, Adler and Van Doren advise remembering that math is a language like any other, with its own conventions and grammar. It is in fact easier to understand than most languages, since it is not spoken and there are no emotional connotations. Treat it like this and it will become less inscrutable. (Shortform note: Many people are intimidated by math after struggling with it in school. According to Barbara Oakley, author of A Mind for Numbers, it’s entirely possible to teach yourself math concepts as an adult, even if the subject doesn’t come naturally to you.)

The Four Questions:

Reading Outdated Science Books

Adler and Van Doren argue that one of the primary reasons to read scientific texts is to understand the history of science and the thought process that underlies the scientific method—not necessarily to understand the science in the book itself. This is particularly important because science is constantly evolving and some foundational works no longer represent scientific fact.

For example, Ptolemy’s Almagest is one of the earliest classics of scientific literature. It describes a geocentric model of the solar system (in which the sun revolves around the Earth, rather than the Earth revolving around the sun) that was the dominant scientific understanding of the universe until the 16th century. From a modern perspective, we know that Ptolemy’s astronomy was wrong; however, reading the Almagest is still valuable because it gives us a glimpse into how historical humans made sense of the world around them.

Thus, while reading older science books is a worthy endeavor, it’s important to ask additional questions, like “When was this written? Does this author’s conception of scientific fact still hold true?”

Philosophy

According to Adler and Van Doren, philosophical works discuss the kinds of questions that children ask. Broadly, these questions can be:

Unlike science, which often requires external data, philosophy deals with questions that can be answered entirely within the mind. (Shortform note: In a 1989 interview, Adler argued that “the sciences give us knowledge of the world, but not understanding of it and certainly no wisdom about it.”) The questions are varied and deep—for example, does life have meaning? Where do thoughts come from? How did the universe begin? And so on. However, note that not all questions asked by philosophers were philosophical. For example, the question “Where do thoughts come from?” may not be purely philosophical in light of advances in modern neuroscience.

New Questions for the 21st Century

In many ways, philosophy is a relatively unchanging discipline—philosophers today struggle with the same questions that Aristotle and Plato asked. However, the social technological revolutions of the last century have brought some new philosophical questions to light, including:

Adler and Van Doren argue that the masses were the intended readers of philosophy works, at least until the 1930s. This includes the work of ancient philosophers like Aristotle and Plato. However, like math and science books, the authors argue that modern philosophy books aren’t written for lay readers. (Shortform note: While this may have been true in 1972, several popular, easily-accessible philosophy books have been published since. For example, in 1974, Robert M. Pirsig published Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a philosophical novel that quickly became a bestseller.)

Classic philosophical works occur in various forms, such as:

  1. Dialogues (like Plato)
  2. Essays written straightforwardly (like Aristotle)
  3. Meeting of objections, first giving the wrong answer then countering (like Aquinas)
  4. Systemization, which is formalizing in mathematical form (Descartes)
  5. Aphorisms, containing pithy statements that the reader must work to connect and expand (like Nietzsche).

(Shortform note: If you’re brand new to reading philosophy, you may wish to start by reading dialogues. Philosophical dialogues are written like a play in which two or more characters debate philosophical topics. The use of characters and the conversational format makes it easier and more fun to follow the argument.)

On theological works: Adler and Van Doren recommend temporarily suspending your disbelief about the dogma in order to evaluate the author’s argument. Take the assumptions to be true, then see what arguments and conclusions result. Do not discard the entire work, assuming the arguments are as dogmatic as the assumptions. (Shortform note: Adler’s perspective on reading theological works as a nonbeliever is unique. He spent much of his career as a secular philosopher studying the work of Catholic theologian St. Thomas Aquinas before eventually converting to Christianity at the age of 81.)

The Four Questions:

Additional Tips for Reading Philosophy

Many guides to reading philosophy parrot Adler and Van Doren’s advice for general analytical reading (such as skimming first, reading twice, and taking notes in the margins). Here are some additional tips for reading philosophical works that expand on Adler and Van Doren’s advice:

Social Sciences

This group includes economics, politics, sociology, psychology, and possibly those of professional trades (law, business). According to the authors, social science texts appear to be “easy” reading material, since they use jargon that has penetrated daily life—words like “psyche” and “gender.” The topics relate to your everyday experience. However, for this reason, you likely come in with preexisting bias, which must be ignored to read analytically.

(Shortform note: In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman calls this form of bias “What You See Is All There Is.” As humans, we naturally see the world from our own perspectives—so much so that we don’t even realize others might see the world in a different way. Therefore, the first step to overcoming bias is to realize your own view is biased in the first place.)

Furthermore, unlike science works, social science works tend not to define the essential terms and postulates. This is aggravated by the blending together of multiple fields, thus creating a struggle to define terms like “workforce” as clearly as “electron.” (Shortform note: Many authors in the social sciences do define their essential terms—however, these terms may differ from common usage. For example, in White Fragility, author Robin DiAngelo defines racism in terms of social power and control of key institutions, not in terms of individual prejudices.)

Adler and Van Doren advise reading several social science books on the same subject, since there usually aren’t single texts that comprehensively explore a topic. You should also look out for new or revised editions of social science books you’ve already read, since the field evolves quickly and authors often revise their work in order to stay relevant. (Shortform note: Revising and rereleasing older work is less common among social science writers now than it was when Adler and Van Doren were writing; now, social scientists typically release new books as a complement to their older work. For example, Daniel Kahneman published his landmark book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, in 2011; in 2021, he collaborated with other subject experts on Noise, which extends the ideas of Thinking, Fast and Slow into a new direction.)

Applying the “Four Questions” to Social Science Books

You may notice that, unlike the sections on other types of books, this section does not end with “The Four Questions.” That’s because Adler and Van Doren are adamant that readers of social science literature shouldn’t focus on a single book—they should focus on a single subject and read several books on it (hence why this section comes at the end of the chapter, just before Comparative Reading). However, if we were to apply the Four Questions template here, it might look like this:

The Four Questions:

Part 6: Comparative Reading

The first three levels of reading (and the specific advice in Part 5) all focus on reading a singular text. Now, we’ll talk about applying those analytical skills across a multitude of texts. Adler and Van Doren call this “syntopical reading.” “Syntopical” is a neologism Adler’s Encyclopedia Britannica team invented; for simplicity, we’ll call this type of reading “comparative” reading.

Comparative reading aims to compare books and authors to one another, to model dialogues between authors that may not be in any one of the books. The ultimate aim of comparative reading is to understand all the conflicting viewpoints relating to a subject. It’s not to devise your own synthetic answer, as this would merely be an entry into the literature, rather than an understanding of what already exists. (Shortform note: In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, author Thomas C. Foster describes “intertextuality,” which is the common references and themes that exist across fiction books. Reading literature with an intertextual lens is similar to reading expository books comparatively.)

The Process of Comparative Reading

Here are the major steps of comparative reading according to the authors. (Shortform note: Adler and Van Doren list these as a set of five steps, each containing many sub-steps. For clarity, we’ve expanded the list so that each step is one distinct action.)

1. Create a total bibliography of works that may be relevant to your subject.

2. Inspect all of the books on your bibliography to decide which are relevant to your subject and to better define the subject.

3. Go through each book on your list and mark specific chapters or passages you intend to use.

4. Develop a set of common terms and rephrase each author’s argument in that language.

5. Develop a set of questions that each author provides answers to.

6. Get a sense of the complexity of the issues.

7. Order the questions and issues to throw maximum light on the subject.

The authors suggest omitting imaginative works from comparative reading, because the propositions are obscured by plot and are rarely explicitly attributed to the author (a character’s speech could be satirical). (Shortform note: Including fiction in a comparative project is complicated indeed, but may still be valuable. For example, reading only historical accounts of 18th century English and Irish politics without reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (or of ancient Greece without reading the works of Homer or Sophocles) would be a major omission, despite the influence of fiction.)

Comparative Reading vs. Literature Review

In academic settings, literature reviews are a common undertaking. Literature reviews are similar to comparative reading projects in that the goal is to gain a wide understanding of what other thinkers have to say about a certain subject. Researchers conducting literature reviews often complete extra steps that Adler and Van Doren don’t mention in their discussion of comparative reading; however, these steps might be useful for comparative reading projects. For example: