How to Read a Book

Or, what forty years of reading did not teach me. After decades of reading books, I have decided to finally learn How to Read a Book. There is a particular kind of embarrassment in that sentence, and I have made my peace with it. Mortimer J. Adler published it in 1940. He revised it in 1972 with Charles Van Doren1, and that is the edition I read, and most likely the one you have too. It is not a book about loving books. It is closer to a manual, written by a man who believed reading is a skill, that most adults quietly stopped learning it somewhere around the sixth grade, and that this was worth being blunt about. He splits reading into four levels, each one folded into the next. Elementary is what school gave you. What does the sentence say? Most of us stopped here and have been coasting ever since. Inspectional is reading on a budget. Systematic skimming (the table of contents, the index, the preface, a paragraph here and there) to answer one question: what kind of book is this, and…