How to Read a Book, Chapter 5
Chapter 5: How to Be a Demanding Reader
This chapter, between inspectional reading and analytical, seems to be mostly an encouraging aside, to motivate the reader to continue and learn the more difficult aspects of active reading. Adler and Van Doren begin by contrasting people who read for relaxation with those who read for self-improvement. The seeker after understanding, they suggest, maintained focus and intensity because "it made a difference to them, a great difference, whether or not they read the book they had in hand." This statement for the first time leads to an acknowledgement that the reader's goal in reading is central to success. I'd argue further, that it's central to the type of reading and note-making the reader will do. I think the authors lean too heavily into a sort-of one size fits all description of how to do this type of inspectional and analytical reading and only open up a bit when they get to syntopical reading in Chapter 20. But that may be because this isn't new to me, so I'll suspend my judgment.
The "essence" of active reading, they say, is to ask questions of the text and answer them for yourself as you read. The basic questions are:
1. What is the book about as a whole?
2. What is being said in detail, and how?
3. Is the book true?
4. What of it?
The last is the very interesting "So what?" question I ask my students to think about when they are concluding essays. It seems like this should be the task of a good inspectional reading. I'd certainly like to know whether a book is going to be worth my while, before I invest a lot of time into it. The third question, about the truth of the book, seems relevant but not as essential to me. I often read books I don't expect to agree with, to gather information and to see how other people think. I don't really think even a novice reader should expect or try to be "convinced" by an author.
The authors, however, return to the theme that "Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not." While I agree that we can assume that the author of a book knows more about the subject than the reader (or else what's the point of writing or reading), I'm still a bit put off by the hierarchical, master-pupil dynamic their descriptions typically incite in my imagination. Maybe they're actually trying to reassure readers that they imagine as regular people who might be somewhat intimidated by the idea that they're going to intrude on the literary world of their "betters". I don't think I'll need to lean too heavily into this idea -- it seems that if they ever were intimidated, people have become a bit less so in the generations since this was written.
The next section describes "How to Make a Book Your Own", and I was very impressed with the practical advice it contained. I really like the idea of there being a process by which we make ideas our own. For me this is achieved in stages, from highlighting to paraphrasing to commenting to writing detailed responses. It was nice to see a similar process described by Adler and Van Doren. One of the first things they do is reassure the reader that it is in fact okay to write in books you own and that this level of engagement could be thought of as the "highest respect you can pay" an author. They also mention that "thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written." This reminded me so much of Niklas Luhmann's claim that "thinking is writing", that I had to highlight it and comment in the margin. Finally, they suggest that readers should even allow themselves to disagree and "argue with the teacher", once they are sure they understand what the author is saying. I agree of course, but this is an interesting admission for them to make, given their apparent commitment to the master-pupil hierarchy.
The mechanics of this process are not surprising, although it's fun to read what must have been probably a first introduction of these techniques to most of their readers. Underlining or drawing vertical lines in the margin are the first steps, since highlighters didn't yet exist. This is followed by using stars or asterisks sparingly, to mark the major ideas in the book. Numbers in the margin can indicate either elements of an argument or can refer to other pages in the book (or in a syntopic read, even in other books). Keywords or phrases can be circled (I tend to highlight in bold, using the edge of the highlighter rather than the tip). And finally, notes can be written in the margins or at the tops and bottoms of pages.
Adler and Van Doren suggest making an index of important points in the back endpapers of a book, and then when finished, making an outline from memory in the front. The ability to do this from memory, they suggest, is a "measure of your understanding of the work." Then they describe three types of notes the reader might want to make. Structural notes answer the second part of the second question above, describing how the author makes an argument or narrative. Conceptual notes describe the ideas in the text, on the way to answering the third question about truth. And they call the final type of note Dialectical, referring to the dialog between texts that results from syntopical reading. Since I'll probably be dropping the term syntopical in favor of "comparative", I prefer to call these comparative notes.
The final section of the chapter is another encouraging passage about developing habits. The authors say "Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit."Their point, illustrated by a description of learning to ski, is that it's necessary to learn a bunch of steps before you try to put them together into a whole. "In order to forget them as separate acts," they say, "you have to learn them first as separate acts." I suspect this is true, and also that you have to teach them as separate acts. That's a useful takeaway for me.