□ Placeholder: 02 — How to Read a Book
Hello hello —
More than a month has passed away since I last wrote — how have you been?
I recently made my way through How to Read a Book and got some useful insights on, well, reading a book well. The book is about eighty years old but the suggestions on reading a book well still stand valid.
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We usually read a book starting with the cover. Then we read the blurb on the jacket and sometimes running through the table of contents. Then we dive deep right into the first chapter. There’s nothing wrong with it. But according to the book it’s the first level of reading — Elementary reading. There are three more levels — Inspectional, Analytical and Syntopic. Each of these levels are more advanced than the previous.
We have been practicing elementary reading ever since we learned to read. For Inspectional reading, the authors suggest to first skim the book. In one go, without ever looking for meanings of difficult words. If you prefer a step by step process, it goes something like:
- Read the title and the preface
- Read the table of contents
- Read the blurb
- Skim the chapters, reading a paragraph or two from the last pages of the chapters. (Those paragraphs usually contain the distillation of the ideas presented.)
But... What’s the point of this superficial reading in the first place? According to the book, we do not waste time on a book which deserves only a superficial reading. And once you've done this superficial reading, you can decide if you need more time on the book.
> “Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.”
Analytical reading requires a little more from us as readers. Once we decide to read a book analytically, we should try to answer these four questions:
- What’s this book about as a whole?
- What’s the book saying in detail and how?
- Is the book true, in whole or part?
- What of it?
The process of Analytical reading has three parts. The first is classifying the book and understanding its aim and structure. You can do this by doing a quick inspectional reading.
The second part is finding out the problems/questions that the authors tried to address and how. We can do this by interpreting keywords and leading propositions used in the book. When an author puts forth an argument, they tend to reuse certain keywords and terms. i.e. Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens reuses the term evolutionary biology. Understanding the term evolutionary biology can pace our grasp of his propositions.
And finally, the third step is to apply your own critical senses and agree or disagree with the author.
Syntopic reading, fourth and the most advanced kind of reading is for readers who want to engage in researching books about one idea. And for the sake of keeping this email to sane length, I would suggest you to pick up the book yourself.
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The book works great if you are looking for suggestions on reading non-fiction. But, it falls short on providing guidance for reading fiction, poetry or drama. Those kind of reading is for pleasure (which, by the way, book is against of) and we make it suit the way we like. Yet, the book is still worth an analytical reading.
So, how have YOU been reading a book?