How to Read a Book

What it is about

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren describe reading as an active hierarchy of skills. Elementary reading decodes the text; inspectional reading rapidly discovers its structure; analytical reading identifies terms, propositions, arguments, and unresolved questions; syntopical reading compares multiple works around a question constructed by the reader. The method turns a book from a stream of sentences into a reasoned conversation that can be examined, challenged, and connected. I keep it on this shelf because I want to change my practice without becoming a machine for self-improvement.

Why I keep it

How to read a book. I had been doing it wrong.

Key ideas

Beside it on the shelf · Productivity & Self-Development