How To Read A Book

What It Is

A manual, and unembarrassed about it. Mortimer Adler published the first version in 1940, when he was a philosopher at the University of Chicago and a leader of the movement that produced the Great Books of the Western World and its index of ideas, the Syntopicon. The book was a bestseller. In 1972 he rewrote it with Charles Van Doren, and that is the version in print.

Its structure is a ladder of four levels: elementary reading, inspectional reading, analytical reading and finally syntopical reading, which means reading many books against one another on a single question. Each level gets rules, numbered, in the manner of a man who spent his life organising knowledge into schemes.

It runs to over four hundred pages, and it is not a book you are meant to read the way you read a novel.

Why It Matters

Adler's central claim is unfashionable and correct: that reading a demanding book is an active skill, that it can be taught, and that most people never learn it. They read for information, at one speed, and then wonder why difficult books do not stay with them.

The middle of the book gives you the techniques, and they work. They are concrete, unglamorous and immediately usable. Distinguish between not understanding a book and disagreeing with it, which is the failure that ruins most public argument.

But the reason this book survives is the last section. Syntopical reading, the top rung of his ladder, is something almost nobody else teaches, and the whole book has been climbing towards it. It is the closest thing in print to a method for thinking with other people's books rather than merely through them.

The weaknesses are real. Adler is donnish, prescriptive and sometimes patronising. His chapters on reading fiction and poetry are the flattest thing in the book, and it is odd that a champion of the great books should have so little to say about pleasure. It could be two hundred pages shorter.

Before You Read

Twelve to fifteen hours if you read every page, and you should not, at least not the first time.

Do what he tells you to do to other books. Inspect it: read the table of contents, the preface, the chapter headings, then decide what you actually need. Read Part One and the analytical reading chapters properly, move lightly over the genre chapters, and then read Part Four, on syntopical reading, with full attention. That is the chapter you came for, and it is buried at the back.

Read it with a pencil. A book about marking books, read passively, is a wasted evening.

Which Edition to Read

• The 1972 revised edition, with Charles Van Doren (Touchstone paperback) — recommended. The complete and current text, containing the levels of reading, the rules, the chapters on different genres, the reading list at the back and the exercises. This is the book everyone means when they name it, and the paperback is cheap and durable. The cost: the 1972 revision is a good deal longer and more repetitive than the 1940 original, and the padding shows. View on Amazon →
• The 1940 first edition (Simon and Schuster). Adler alone, shorter and sharper, with a polemical energy the revision loses. Worth having if you collect. The cost: no inspectional reading, no syntopical reading, and no updated reading list. It is the smaller book.
• The unabridged audiobook (Simon and Schuster Audio, 2021, read by Edward Holland). Competent, and a fine way to absorb the first half. The cost: an audiobook about how to mark up a page and argue in the margins is a joke Adler would have enjoyed and would not have approved of. You cannot practise this book with your hands full.

Buy the 1972 Touchstone paperback and treat it as a tool rather than a text.

Getting the Most From This Book

Use it on a book you are actually struggling with. The rules are inert on their own and immediately useful the moment you apply them to something that is defeating you.

Do the exercises in the appendix. They are the only part of the book that tests whether you have understood the rest of it, and they are the part everyone skips.

Take his four questions seriously. Written on a card and kept in the book you are reading, they will do more for you than the four hundred pages around them.

The commonest mistake is to read this cover to cover, feel virtuous, and change nothing.