While I was reading it, I kept saying to myself that it was the most boring book I had ever read. How do you write a book about how to read a book? How do you teach people to read a book in a book? You have to assume that the reader cannot read a book properly. Then you go step by step, slowly and patiently. You repeat yourself over and over again to make sure the reader does not miss any point. In addition, you want the book to be as good as the great books you teach the reader to read. The result is a perfect book which is tedious and dry.
The authors, Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren, are from the Institute for Philosophical Research, and I assume they are certain philosophers. they are editors of Annals of America, and Great Books of the Western World. The book is a second edition, published in 1972. The first edition was published in 1940. Some of the research methods described in the book is now outdated, since we have internet and search engines for research. I want to see a third edition to this book that include the current research technologies.
Nonetheless, there are a few things I find interesting and informative from the book.
1. This book talks about how to read not for entertainment, not for information, but for understanding, and describes the difference between the different reading goals. Only reading for understanding can help us grow.
2. Make the book your own by writing in the margins, the front and the back blank pages of the book, and underlining important passages.
3. Read the dust cover, the front matters, the table of contents, the index, before reading the book. But if the book is imaginative literature, do not read the commentary first. Go directly into the book, and try to understand the book on your own before reading any commentaries and reading guides.
4. In the appendix B there are several reading exercises and tests. The subjects are interesting in themselves--biographies of John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), Sir Isaac Newton (1612-1727), Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), Charles Darwin (1809-1882), tables of contents of The Divine Comedy, The Origin of Species, and passages from Aristotle's Politics and Rousseau's The Social Contract. I've learned something about these men and their works which otherwise I might have missed (except The Origin of Species).
This following passage is insightful:
Perhaps we know more about the world than we used to, and insofar as knowledge is prerequisite to understanding, that is all to the good. But knowledge is not as much a prerequisite to understanding as is commonly supposed. We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.Some other passages of interest:
One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance). The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, is presented with a whole complex of elements--all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics--to make it easy for him to "make up his own mind" with the minimum of difficulty and effort. But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and "plays back" the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. he has performed acceptably without having had to think. (p.4)
Because of the difference in method and subject matter, the philosopher usually finds it easier to teach students who have not been previously taught by his colleagues, whereas the scientist prefers the student whom his colleagues have already prepared. (p.74)Here's an except illustrating the dryness of the book (and also shows its date):
Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider." (p.139)
The reader who supposes he should be totally deaf to all appeals might just as well not read practical books. (p.198)
Suppose, for example, that you read an article about how to make a chocolate mousse. You like chocolate mousse, and so you agree with the authoer of the article that the end in view is good. You also accept the author's proposed means for attaining the end--his recipe. But you are a male reader who never goes into the kitchen, and so you do not make a mousse. does this invalidate our point?
It does not, although it does indicate an important distinction between types of practical books that should be mentioned. with regard to the ends proposed by the authors of such works, these are sometimes general or universal--applicable to all human beings--and sometimes applicable only to a certain portion of human beings. If the end is universal--as it is, for example, with this book, which maintains that all persons should read better, not just some--then the implication discussed in this section applies to every reader. If the end is selective, applying only to a certain class of human beings, then the reader must decide whether or not he belongs to that class. if he does, then the implication applies to him, and he is more or less obligated to act in the way s specified by the author. if he does not, then he may not be so obligated.
We say "may not be so obligated" because there is a strong possibility that the reader may be fooling himself, or misunderstanding his own motives, in deciding that he does not belong to the class to which the end is relevant. in the case of the reader of the article about chocolate mousse, he is probably, by his inaction, expressing his view that, although mousse is admittedly delicious, someone else--perhaps his wife--should be the one to make it. And in many cases, we concede the desirability of an end and the feasibility of the means, but in one way or another express our reluctance to perform the action ourselves. Let someone else do it, we say, more or less explicitly.
This, of course, is not primarily a reading problem but rather a psychological one. Nevertheless, the psychological fact has bearing on how effectively we read a practical book, and so we have discussed the matter here.