I spend quite a lot of time reading books. Ergo,
it’s not surprising that finding out more about
the act of reading itself interests me. Nevertheless,
I didn’t look for this book… it found me, during
one of my random browsing sessions of Amazon.
When I saw the title I immediately got intrigued - you
don’t see much books about books. When I read the
description, editorial’s review and a few users’
comments, I immediately felt it’s a “must have”, and
added it to my wishlist, buying it after a couple
of months.

With this in mind, my expectations from “How to
read a book” were quite high, on one hand. On the
other hand, what can someone teach me about reading ?
I mean, reading is the basic art of following with
your eyes a few pages (or a few hundred pages), trying
to understand what the author means. Sometimes it’s
for entertainment, and sometimes it’s for education.

Well, it appears that there is something to learn
about reading, but the authors of “How to read” don’t
even pretend to teach you about the reading you think
of when you think of “reading”.
The authors divide the activity of reading
to four categories:

Elementary - this is the reading
we all think of, mostly for entertainment - read the
book once, cover to cover, put it back on the shelf.
If the book’s bad, not much to do. If it’s good, in the
worst case you gained a few hours of entertainment, in
the best case you also learned something. The authors
don’t talk much about this kind of reading, because
we all know how to do it.

Inspectional - you have a book in your hands, and you
should decide whether you want to read it. The book
is 800 pages long, and you have 30 minutes to decide.
What do you do ? This is not a completely fictitious
scenario. Consider taking a stroll through a bookstore,
picking up a book from the shelf and deciding whether
to buy it. Consider going to the library, finding some
book on the topic you need, and deciding whether you
really want to read this book. You are faced with
the challenge of Inspectional reading - inspecting the
book in a limited time. So what do you do ? This,
“How to read a book” tries to teach. (Read front cover,
foreword, back cover, go through the table of contents,
last few pages, last pages of chapters, index, etc…)

Analytical - this type of reading the authors develop
the most, devoting a big part of the book to it. This
is reading a serious book, seriously. By serious I mean
not just for entertainment, because there Elementary
reading would suffice. I mean reading a book that it
over your head - in order to learn something new. Here
lays the most important lesson from “How to read a book”,
by the way. The authors (rightfully) claim that if you
really want to expand your thinking and “grow your mind”,
you should read books that are over your capacity, not
under it. By reading easy books you won’t gain much. You
will, however, gain a lot by reading works that are
hard to you, that you find hard to understand. The act
of (analytically - using methods the authors teach
during this chapter) reading this book and understanding
it is some kind of enlightment - you have expanded your
thinking - you can now grasp something you could not
grasp before. It’s a very good lesson from this book,
in my opinion. So, Analytical reading is the act of reading
such books - how to understand the important story line, the
author’s questions, his problems, solutions to these
problems, understanding where the author comes from,
(dis)agreeing with the author, et cetera.

The last type of reading the authors present is Syntopical
reading. This is the reading of several books on the same
subject, trying to gain from them something that’s not
in any single book. The subject must be something relatively
vague - something which isn’t clearly defined and agreed on
by everyone. Different authors should have a different
opinion on the subject, and by syntopically reading their books,
you can form an opinion of your own, which is possibly not
the opinion of any of the authors you’ve read. This is discovery
and mind expansion in its purest sense.
Hence, IMHO, is more for the researchers,
as Syntopical reading takes a very long time, but its
benefits are probably formulating some new ideas about
complicated subjects.

The book is concluded with a recommended reading list,
of books that are “over most people’s heads”, and a few
exercises in reading (with questions), which at first
I wanted to skip, but eventually went through them and
enjoyed quite a bit.

All in all, I liked this book. It didn’t stand to my original
expectation, but could it ? I’m not sure. It taught me other
things, however. The most important lesson I gained is that
one should read hard books, but good ones - for becoming
smarter. I guess I’m on the right way trying to get through
the best classics of the past two centuries (a list I mentioned
before in this journal, which has many similarities with the
recommended reading list of this book). For now, I’m at 17 out
of 110, so there’s still a long way to go I hope that “How to
read a book” will help me tackle some of the trickier works
on this list.

Related posts:

1. Book review: “Peopleware” by DeMarco and Lister
2. Book review: “Perl Medic” by Peter J. Scott
3. Book review: “The Da Vinci code” by Dan Brown
4. Book review: “Countdown to Spanish” by Gail Stein
5. Book review: “VHDL Coding Styles …” by Ben Cohen

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