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542 reviews for:
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren
3.81 AVERAGE
542 reviews for:
How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren
3.81 AVERAGE
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
lots of good stuff but the white western man cringe is off the charts. "he" and "him" for every pronoun of an author of a book feels violent.
biggest cringe: pp. 196-7
"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 author 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... although mousse is admittedly delicious, someone else—perhaps his wife—should be the one to make it."
their list of 137 best writers of all time include 135 white guys and two white women, one of whom is George Eliot who the authors maybe thought was a dude. no Martin Luther King Jr and no Mary Shelley
very dismissive of Marx, treating it as a religion. the authors didn't read Capital critically enough.
recently I read Sara Ahmed's "Living a Feminist Life" where she had a policy of not citing any men. seems aggressive but very understandable given that this book's way of thinking was 99% of academia for thousands of years.
biggest cringe: pp. 196-7
"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 author 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... although mousse is admittedly delicious, someone else—perhaps his wife—should be the one to make it."
their list of 137 best writers of all time include 135 white guys and two white women, one of whom is George Eliot who the authors maybe thought was a dude. no Martin Luther King Jr and no Mary Shelley
very dismissive of Marx, treating it as a religion. the authors didn't read Capital critically enough.
recently I read Sara Ahmed's "Living a Feminist Life" where she had a policy of not citing any men. seems aggressive but very understandable given that this book's way of thinking was 99% of academia for thousands of years.
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
slow-paced
informative
medium-paced
This book is so far up its own a** that its laughable. Looking at the recommended readings in the appendix, I immediately understood that this book was intended for *serious* readers only. You're expected to start with Homer so... On the list of 137 essential writers - 137 are Western and white (we can debate who wrote the Bible somewhere else) and 2 are female - Jane Austen and George Eliot.
I almost panned it then but then I got to pg. 42 where I was asked to grab my handy-dandy Declaration of (American) Independence ("you probably have a copy of it available") and I laughed so hard that I knew I had to finish it.
To use their own format of critique (Judging the Author's Soundness - pg 156) we can say that the authors are both "uninformed" and "misinformed." By their definition, the uninformed author "lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve." The misinformed author "propos[es] as true or more probable what is in fact false or less probable. He is claiming to have knowledge he does not possess." Here the author lacks the knowledge that people other than white men write and read books ... some of which are *important literature* and some of which are not.
All this serves to make the entire book a joke. Nobody likes to be condescended to and this book is extremely condescending.
I must concede that it is logical and the advice that it gives is great for reading the books it concerns itself with.
If you only plan to read the books that you're told to read to be considered *intelligent* and * a man of education* then I'm sure this book would be helpful.
I almost panned it then but then I got to pg. 42 where I was asked to grab my handy-dandy Declaration of (American) Independence ("you probably have a copy of it available") and I laughed so hard that I knew I had to finish it.
To use their own format of critique (Judging the Author's Soundness - pg 156) we can say that the authors are both "uninformed" and "misinformed." By their definition, the uninformed author "lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve." The misinformed author "propos[es] as true or more probable what is in fact false or less probable. He is claiming to have knowledge he does not possess." Here the author lacks the knowledge that people other than white men write and read books ... some of which are *important literature* and some of which are not.
All this serves to make the entire book a joke. Nobody likes to be condescended to and this book is extremely condescending.
I must concede that it is logical and the advice that it gives is great for reading the books it concerns itself with.
If you only plan to read the books that you're told to read to be considered *intelligent* and * a man of education* then I'm sure this book would be helpful.
This book was the missing link, I feel, in my attempt to have a comprehensive knowledge management system. I had found a lot of books on how to _organize_ information, and even on how to take what I read and use it in other contexts, but this was the book that showed me how to make those first notes and have a method for demonstrating that I understand a book in a useful way.
The book has the following basic arguments, I feel:
1. People should actively engage with what they read, not just passively read it and toss that information aside, or just as badly, accept it without any interrogation.
2. The author argues that the speed one reads a book is less important than having different forms of reading a book based one one's intentions: the way of reading a book when you are evaluating its worthiness is different than from when you are trying to glean as much from it as possible, or from when you are reading it as part of researching a larger topic
3. The author tries to make a uniform(ish) framework for applying his overall heuristic against a variety of kinds of books.
I haven't really tried this overall process on everything I've read yet, but I have found that it has honed me thinking in at least a starting way. I'm not sure how useful the breakdown is, but I will say that once I did it, I did feel like I had put in the work to show that I really did get what the book was about. I don't know if it will be worth it for everything (it was an exhausting effort) but I already can see how this would be good for fiction I find profound and challenging, or for work that I want to constantly revisit and possibly use to make vague ideas more clear.
The author isn't quite successful at having a single method that applies to everything; trying to claim that his steps of finding terms and propositions and arguments is the same as what he dictates for understanding fiction is a very long stretch. This being said, at least he provides a method.
At the end of the day, this entire process only makes sense if you plan on doing _something_ with the work you make out of this, and if you don't find yourself ever using these notes ever again, it probably isn't worth it. I've already, however, seen a bunch of places where these notes are better at helping me find what in the book I plan on revisiting or combining with other information than it would be if I had just attempted to summarize the book based on my initial intuitions.
The book has the following basic arguments, I feel:
1. People should actively engage with what they read, not just passively read it and toss that information aside, or just as badly, accept it without any interrogation.
2. The author argues that the speed one reads a book is less important than having different forms of reading a book based one one's intentions: the way of reading a book when you are evaluating its worthiness is different than from when you are trying to glean as much from it as possible, or from when you are reading it as part of researching a larger topic
3. The author tries to make a uniform(ish) framework for applying his overall heuristic against a variety of kinds of books.
I haven't really tried this overall process on everything I've read yet, but I have found that it has honed me thinking in at least a starting way. I'm not sure how useful the breakdown is, but I will say that once I did it, I did feel like I had put in the work to show that I really did get what the book was about. I don't know if it will be worth it for everything (it was an exhausting effort) but I already can see how this would be good for fiction I find profound and challenging, or for work that I want to constantly revisit and possibly use to make vague ideas more clear.
The author isn't quite successful at having a single method that applies to everything; trying to claim that his steps of finding terms and propositions and arguments is the same as what he dictates for understanding fiction is a very long stretch. This being said, at least he provides a method.
At the end of the day, this entire process only makes sense if you plan on doing _something_ with the work you make out of this, and if you don't find yourself ever using these notes ever again, it probably isn't worth it. I've already, however, seen a bunch of places where these notes are better at helping me find what in the book I plan on revisiting or combining with other information than it would be if I had just attempted to summarize the book based on my initial intuitions.
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
I'm reserving full judgement until I try out some of the strategies he recommends, but it was thought provoking. I'm inspired to read more broadly than the novels I've previously gravitated towards.
"How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading" by Mortimer Adler, offers itself as a strong guide intended to instruct readers on how to engage and gain enlightenment (which is a step beyond gaining information) from reading. It should be made clear that this book is intended to instruct readers in the reading of expository books. This section of the book, particularly where the author explores how a reader must gain understanding of the various step of reading, shines. During my own reading of this early section of the book I felt my brain light up like a pinball machine as I thought about the potential application of these steps for my future high school ELA students. Adler's argument, that many students are suffering from a lack of full understanding of the early steps of reading, and that it interferes with their ability to grasp the later steps of reading, with the compounded problem that results from reading instruction ceasing at around 6th grade... well. To say it felt relevant after teaching a college composition course is an understatement.
While there is a section dedicated to books outside of expository writing, it is small. I would suggest that the case that it makes for how to read "imaginative books", particularly the argument that you must read books that fall into that category without looking for an argument because imaginative literature cannot possess an argument, is flawed at least in part due in part to the brevity which was used during the analysis of how one reads imaginative literature. If you are looking for a book to instruct in the reading of fiction, literary or otherwise, this is where "How to Read a Book" sags in its usefulness. However, that was not the intent for which it was written, which is something that must be acknowledged.
I found the book's discussion of analytical reading and syntopical reading very helpful. I believe that this is something that my past English instructors had been trying to offer instruction on, but this book achieved a greater understanding of how to actually perform the steps to do so than I encountered in my pursuit of an English Literature Degree.
I would certainly recommend this book for anyone who wants to enhance what they gain from their reading.
While there is a section dedicated to books outside of expository writing, it is small. I would suggest that the case that it makes for how to read "imaginative books", particularly the argument that you must read books that fall into that category without looking for an argument because imaginative literature cannot possess an argument, is flawed at least in part due in part to the brevity which was used during the analysis of how one reads imaginative literature. If you are looking for a book to instruct in the reading of fiction, literary or otherwise, this is where "How to Read a Book" sags in its usefulness. However, that was not the intent for which it was written, which is something that must be acknowledged.
I found the book's discussion of analytical reading and syntopical reading very helpful. I believe that this is something that my past English instructors had been trying to offer instruction on, but this book achieved a greater understanding of how to actually perform the steps to do so than I encountered in my pursuit of an English Literature Degree.
I would certainly recommend this book for anyone who wants to enhance what they gain from their reading.
This was a great refresher on a lot of the skills I learned in school, but didn't give me a ton of new information or techniques. The suggested reading list at the end of the book was probably the part that excited me the most.
If you're interested in reading this book, I would probably recommend skipping to the parts that seem the most relevant to you. There's a great table of contents and it's worth using.
If you're interested in reading this book, I would probably recommend skipping to the parts that seem the most relevant to you. There's a great table of contents and it's worth using.