How to Read a Book, Chapter 1

My notes on the classic text

Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren

First edition 1940. I'm reading the 1972 edition, which is almost identical to the current edition you can buy today on Kindle.

I'll post some ideas that occurred to me as I was reading each chapter.

Chapter 1: The Activity and Art of Reading

Adler points out that reading is a complex activity, and the more energy the reader applies in the process, the better. I don't disagree, but I think the amount of effort I'll expend is probably variable, depending on my particular goal in reading the text. I think an aspect that's missing in Adler's argument in this chapter is the idea that we're not always trying to squeeze all of the juice out of the lemon.

One of the other readers in my book club, Chris Aldrich, commented that he wasn't sure why the authors admonished the reader against seeking outside help when reading. Chris asks what if a text assumes too much familiarity with cultural elements that may have changed since its writing? It does strike me that people like Adler and Van Doren were probably a bit more "embedded" in the Western Canon (Adler did create the Great Books program, after all), and the rest of the world (even the West) may no longer feel quite the same commitment to understanding all the references and easter eggs that might be buried in a text. A few pages later, the authors describe how unsatisfying it can be to have to reach for a reference. How much it may break the flow of a narrative or an argument; and I get that.

In a section called "The Goals of Reading", the authors distinguish between "information" and "understanding". While I think there's something to this, I object to the hierarchical way they describe these ideas. It's as if information is trivial and understanding transcendent. They give an example of "a history that seeks not merely to give [readers] some facts but also to throw a new and perhaps more revealing light on all the facts [they] know." I can't imagine a history that only sought to provide a reader "some facts" without advancing an interpretation that would change the way the reader understood the past. They seem to be confused about parts and wholes, or to believe that the only meaningful contributions made by new interpretations are those that are global. I think the distinction is arbitrary, artificial, and whiggish.

Leaning into this attitude, Adler and Van Doren announce that "we can only learn from our 'betters'." At least they put betters inside quotes. But they're still saying reading for understanding rather than facts presupposes a teacher-student relationship? If this was true, primary sources would be for information only, unless I supposed the author was my "better"? This approach would seem to be challenged by cultural relativism, which should have been apparent by 1972 when this edition came out. But they carry on, calling instruction "aided discovery" to emphasize its energetic nature. As I was reading this I was reminded of Hayden White's description of narrative, which I imagine they would consider as seeming to fill in for "discovery". But this is inaccurate because the narrative arc is determined (even though it seems open-ended to the reader), which discovery by observation of external reality is not.

Later in the chapter my friend Chris remarked on the the differences between the reader's relationship with the text and people listening, in purely oral cultures. This got me thinking that most authors of most texts that exist in the world are dead. We're getting an "accurate" depiction of their ideas in print, when in an oral culture we'd be getting ideas that may have originated with people in the distant past but have been altered (even if just by curation) in their process of making it to the present to be recited. Ideas that ceased to be considered relevant would be lost, which I think would reinforce a master narrative by pruning away elements that didn't "fit".

These were some of the ideas I had, reading chapter 1 of How to Read a Book. I'll return shortly with my thoughts on chapter 2.