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482 reviews for:
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Charles Van Doren, Mortimer J. Adler
3.81 AVERAGE
482 reviews for:
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Charles Van Doren, Mortimer J. Adler
3.81 AVERAGE
I really liked the ideas in the book but it's way too long. I know that's because it was written in the 1930s, but I didn't have the patience. The techniques he teaches in this book are things I've already learned to do in grad school. I needed them for technical study of books related to my research. However, I wouldn't enjoy doing this with books for pleasure, even the scientific books I read. So, I'm glad this book exists, but it would benefit from a more substantial revision.
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
slow-paced
i would rather kms than hang out with these authors. The first few sections were helpful as well as a couple other sections later on. Much of the text was repetitive and snobby though.
A must read if you ever want to grow in your reading. Many of us read for fun and entertainment (maybe not so much anymore but for the most part, that's the only reason people read nowadays) but this book really showed me how you can read for more than just entertainment. Truly an enlightening book. I definitely recommend this book to anyone who is looking to get more out of reading.
"George W. Bush, if he were literate, could tap the Chanson de Roland. Was it ever thus? I cannot know. Culture is its own explanations."
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Terror and Its Consequences
Has a book ever been read this way — We cannot know.
Grandpa Simpson was once a distinct parody of the Greatest Generation grandparent, whose onion-belt story is intelligible as a transposition of a famous gag immortalized by Flaubert (with highbrow contempt), "In pantomimes, when a character pulls out his [pocket] watch, it has to be an onion: this never fails to raise a laugh;" (Dictionary of Received Ideas). With the passing of this generation (who once appreciated pantomime), we regret that Grandpa Simpson has become a blight on the screen; since the death of his model it's impossible to write him funny.
We'll miss perhaps much less the passing of those midcentury Great Books advocates who wrote literary theory for people incapable of reading literary theory, and remained — in a display of why all that reading wasn't good for anything — oblivious to the humor in this. Adler in particular embodying the writer of lazy metaphor who often finds himself parodied by Nabokov (though the model for this kind of writing, unfortunately, will never die): "To pass from understanding less to understanding more by your own intellectual effort in reading is something like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. It certainly feels that way. It is a major exertion. Obviously, it is a more active kind of reading than you have done before, entailing not only more varied activity but also much more skill in the performance of the various acts required" (10).
The following conceit of reader-as-baseball-catcher is a distinctly mid-20th-century Americanism (a catachresis and a second strike against our author). Of course, in the sense that "understanding more" is like "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps" you can't get there from here any more than you could "catch a slider" . . . whatever that means (we cannot know).
Decided I don't want to finish it right now. May come back to it later.
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
Rating this as a "book" is strange, because it's instructional. It's like rating the guide to an IKEA assembly guide. If the end result was a shelf, then the instructions were successful. And if you don't, or they involved a struggle to understand, then they probably weren't.
So do I know how to read a book? Yes, ignoring the obvious, of course, but this is a book that means to truly "absorb" a book. They use an analogy regarding baseball, whether a ball is "caught" or not. If a reader does not "catch" the book, then the work they do to bridge the gap of knowledge is the "enlightenment" that the reader will experience. Really, this book is commendable for trying to address that people do not indeed know "how" to read a book, that they are pre-fed an understanding and interpretation to pass a course or expected to be well-read by a societal peer pressure at the cost of never truly understanding a book past a surface level.
Some flaws: Although I wouldn't call this a self-help book, strictly speaking, I think that it has its hallmarks in the way it occasionally negs the reader and makes them doubt themselves. It takes on some self-deprecation, in saying that few people ever perfectly understand a book, and those that do are very few and far between. That the learning, and the effort, is in trying. However, their methodology to get to that is flawed as a result. They write a tautology at some point that suggests that reading something by an author means the reader must agree or disagree, or defer judgement if they feel they have not understood the material in full. Disagreement, of course, means that the reader must have a learned reason why that is not the case (one not driven by emotion). They then turn this tautology on their own work, saying that if the reader accepts all the words said as being true, then it is their imperative to read in the style that Adler and van Doren dictate.
No.
This book does almost nothing to talk about reading with different critical lenses, like Marxism, or semiotics, or other modes of thinking that, while not guaranteed to be the solution, is better than the blind charge that this book tries to encourage. They begrudgingly give advice on how to use reference books and specify that the history of words. They're right to at least feel suspicious that a reference book will taint a reader's perception of how to understand a word or concept. But outright dismissing Shakespeare editions that have that reference sheet baked into it puts a lot of faith in the reader that if they are not intelligent, that they will not grow frustrated with the struggle. This is simply my opinion, to be sure, but what I find contradictory is the idea that the reader must accept this style of reading as the best option while in the same book admitting that "few have truly understood a book." Really? Does that include the authors themselves, who have placed hundreds of works in their recommended reading list? And if they have failed to understand the reading, does that not mean that their own methodology is flawed? Are they not obligated to propose a better alternative to what they have done? I certainly do not have one--as flawed as their tautology is, I follow it in some degree. But I think it's a bit much to write a book literally declaring it is the way "to read a book" and then shrug and say "Well, but who has ever read a book, really?"
I picked this during my Ph.D because the classes weren't as demanding as I wanted them to be (or to involve something a little more dynamic and a little less like busywork.) I was feeling a little intellectually flabby and even the book itself was a difficult read. I'm saying this because if you are an English Major, you likely already know most of what this book proposes and more. But if you don't study English and want to crack the code a little, this is gonna get you where you need to go.
So do I know how to read a book? Yes, ignoring the obvious, of course, but this is a book that means to truly "absorb" a book. They use an analogy regarding baseball, whether a ball is "caught" or not. If a reader does not "catch" the book, then the work they do to bridge the gap of knowledge is the "enlightenment" that the reader will experience. Really, this book is commendable for trying to address that people do not indeed know "how" to read a book, that they are pre-fed an understanding and interpretation to pass a course or expected to be well-read by a societal peer pressure at the cost of never truly understanding a book past a surface level.
Some flaws: Although I wouldn't call this a self-help book, strictly speaking, I think that it has its hallmarks in the way it occasionally negs the reader and makes them doubt themselves. It takes on some self-deprecation, in saying that few people ever perfectly understand a book, and those that do are very few and far between. That the learning, and the effort, is in trying. However, their methodology to get to that is flawed as a result. They write a tautology at some point that suggests that reading something by an author means the reader must agree or disagree, or defer judgement if they feel they have not understood the material in full. Disagreement, of course, means that the reader must have a learned reason why that is not the case (one not driven by emotion). They then turn this tautology on their own work, saying that if the reader accepts all the words said as being true, then it is their imperative to read in the style that Adler and van Doren dictate.
No.
This book does almost nothing to talk about reading with different critical lenses, like Marxism, or semiotics, or other modes of thinking that, while not guaranteed to be the solution, is better than the blind charge that this book tries to encourage. They begrudgingly give advice on how to use reference books and specify that the history of words. They're right to at least feel suspicious that a reference book will taint a reader's perception of how to understand a word or concept. But outright dismissing Shakespeare editions that have that reference sheet baked into it puts a lot of faith in the reader that if they are not intelligent, that they will not grow frustrated with the struggle. This is simply my opinion, to be sure, but what I find contradictory is the idea that the reader must accept this style of reading as the best option while in the same book admitting that "few have truly understood a book." Really? Does that include the authors themselves, who have placed hundreds of works in their recommended reading list? And if they have failed to understand the reading, does that not mean that their own methodology is flawed? Are they not obligated to propose a better alternative to what they have done? I certainly do not have one--as flawed as their tautology is, I follow it in some degree. But I think it's a bit much to write a book literally declaring it is the way "to read a book" and then shrug and say "Well, but who has ever read a book, really?"
I picked this during my Ph.D because the classes weren't as demanding as I wanted them to be (or to involve something a little more dynamic and a little less like busywork.) I was feeling a little intellectually flabby and even the book itself was a difficult read. I'm saying this because if you are an English Major, you likely already know most of what this book proposes and more. But if you don't study English and want to crack the code a little, this is gonna get you where you need to go.
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Dense, but a lot of teaching to chew on. ‘How to read history’ & ‘how to read philosophy’ are especially worth reading.