How to read a book?

“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”— Mortimer Adler

Knowing the name of something and knowing something is different and to know something you have to understand it to its fullest.

 “True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”  - Mortimer J. Adler

Before reading any book asks the below questions: 

•          What is this book about?
•          What is being discussed in detail and how?
•          Is the book true in whole or in part?

What you can get from a books is well explained by the below quote:

“To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.” ― Mortimer J. Adler

Everyday we provide our opinions on lot many issues around us, but do we really understand them to there fullest. You can get the help from books to make an opinion about the subjects of the issues.

If you completed reading a books and you tell someone that you just finished reading a wonderful book. Then, if the person will ask you a simple question, Can you please explain me what you learned from the book? When you start answering this question, you suddenly become a dumb, You just wonder that you don’t remember what you read, Think why? Because you didn’t read the book in a proper way. When we read a book, we are in a argument with the author why he write the way he has written and what other possibilities can be? in what environment the book is written?

When you make the book your own by reading and marking and commenting, means when you own the book not by money but by the knowledge then only you can learn the book to it's depth.

How you own the book?

The answer of this question, we will learn in this post. The answer will come from one book itself. The old classic book How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent reading by Mortimer J. Adler

What the book teaches us, we will see in  this post. Mortimer Adler suggests four level of reading: 

1. Elementary
2. Inspectional
3. Analytical
4. Syntopical

Elementary reading is taught in our school, we all know it. the way we read any book now.

Inspectional reading allows us to look at the author's blueprint and evaluate the merits of a deeper reading experience. there are two sub types of inspectional reading:

·         * Systematic skimming : This is a quick check of the book by (1) reading the preface (2) studying the table of contents (3) checking the index (4) reading the inside jacket. This should give you sufficient knowledge to understand the chapters in the book pivotal to the author's argument and help you to decide whether to read the book or not. it is first screening of the book.

·         * Superficial reading : This is when you just read. Don’t ponder the argument, don’t look things up, don’t write in the margins. If you don’t understand something, move on. What you gain from this quick read will help you later when you go back and put more effort into reading. You now come to another decision point. Now that you have a better understanding of the book's contents and its structure, do you want to understand it? Now once you finish the book and put it aside for some time and then later come back and start reading it again, at this time you understand the book to its fullest.

Analytical reading: 

Francis Bacon once remarked, 

“some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”

Analytical reading is a deep reading of the book. There are four rules to Analytical Reading

·    Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.

•          State what the whole book is about
•          Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation
•         Outline these parts
•          Identify the problem or problems the author is trying to solve

Syntopical Reading : It involves reading many books on the same subject and comparing and contrasting the ideas, vocabulary, and arguments.By reading like this, we identify the relevant passages, translating the terminology, framing and ordering the questions that need answering, defining the issues, and having a conversation with the responses.

The goal is not to achieve an overall understanding of any particular book, but rather to understand the subject and develop a deep fluency.

There are five steps to syntopical reading:

•       Finding the Relevant Passages - You need to find the right books and then the passages that are most relevant to filling your needs. So the first step is an inspectional reading of all the works that you have identified as relevant.
•       Bringing the Author to Terms - In analytical reading, you must identify the keywords and how they are used by the author. This is fairly straightforward. The process becomes more complicated now as each author has probably used different terms and concepts to frame their argument. 
•       Getting the Questions Clear - Rather than focus on the problems the author is trying to solve, you need to focus on the questions that you want answered. Just as we must establish our own terminology. It’s important to frame the questions in such a way that all or most of the authors can be interpreted as providing answers. Sometimes we might not get an answer to our questions because they might not have been seen as questions by the authors.
•       Defining the Issues - If you’ve asked a clear question to which there are multiple answers then an issue has been defined. Opposing answers, now translated into your terms, must be ordered in relation to one another.
•       Analyzing the Discussion - It’s presumptuous to expect we’ll find a single unchallenged truth to any of our questions. Our answer is the conflict of opposing answers. The value is the discussion you have with these authors. You can now have an informed opinion.

There is another technique to understand which book to read, how to identify a good book to read:

“The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.”-  Mortimer J. Adler

Another technique to grasp the most from a books is: The Feynman Technique

There are four simple steps to the Feynman Technique, which I'll explain below:

1.       Choose a Concept
2.       Teach it to a Toddler
3.       Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
4.       Review and Simplify

We will cover Feynman technique in other post.

Disclosure : To write this post, i have borrowed the help from farnam street blog.

Keep reading, Keep learning

-Mahesh