PDF Summary:How to Read a Book, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren

Do you want to understand books better, and remember more of what you read? Do you want to better understand the author’s goal and be a better critic of what you read?

How to Read a Book is the classic guide to reading effectively. It teaches how to understand the crux of a book within 15 minutes, how to analyze a book intelligently, and how to synthesize multiple books together. If you read a lot of books, then it makes sense to learn how to read better and increase the value of your reading.

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How do you find keywords? Adler and Van Doren provide two clues to identifying the most important terms in a book. First, a word is probably important if the author deliberately uses it differently than other writers do (particularly if the author makes a point to explain why those other writers’ definitions are incorrect or incomplete). Second, if you struggle to understand how an author is using a particular word, that’s a sign that the word is important: Authors frequently use keywords in unique ways to express their most important (and, often, most complex) ideas.

More Tips on How to Find Keywords

The process of finding keywords in a text can differ based on the type of text and the way you approach it. For example, shorter works like articles often feature keywords in predefined places—such as the first sentence of the article, the last sentence of the first paragraph, and in any repeated phrase throughout the piece.

Additionally, if you already know something about what you’re reading, that can help you identify the keywords. For example, if you’re reading Darwin’s The Origin of Species, you probably know that Darwin’s ideas were part of the theory of evolution, so you’ll know to keep an eye out for “evolution” as a keyword. You can also look for synonyms and related words or phrases, like “heredity” or “survival of the fittest.”

How to Find Key Sentences

After identifying keywords, Adler and Van Doren recommend finding the author’s leading propositions in her most important sentences. Important sentences express parts of the author’s argument. Here are some tips on how to find them:

• Special sentences may be formatted stylistically or set apart (for example, with italics or underlining).
• The important words are often contained in the important sentences. Therefore, if you spot a keyword, pay special attention to the sentence it’s located in.
• Pay attention to words that confuse you, rather than words that grab your interest. (Shortform note: Remember, the goal of analytical reading is to increase your understanding. It’s perfectly fine to pause at a particularly interesting or entertaining sentence—but if your goal is to better understand the author’s ideas, your time is better spent wrestling with sentences you don’t immediately understand.)

Finding Key Sentences in the Digital Age

In the modern era, there are other, high-tech ways of identifying important sentences that Adler and Van Doren couldn’t imagine in 1972. For example, computer programmers in the field of natural language processing have developed algorithms capable of reading digital text and automatically identifying key terms and sentences. This is especially impressive because the program is partly based on the frequency of a given word in a text, but it has to distinguish between common-but-not-useful words (like “and” or “the”) and the actual keywords of the text. Once the program identifies the keywords based on frequency, it scans every single sentence and highlights those sentences with higher proportions of keywords—which is essentially a computerized version of the process that Adler and Van Doren recommend.

Criticizing a Book

So far in the reading process, if you’ve been following Adler and Van Doren’s advice, you’ve been absorbing what the author has to say without criticism or judgment. However, once you fully understand a book, you have a new responsibility as a reader: to argue with it.

According to Adler and Van Doren, when criticizing, your job is to determine which of her questions the author has answered, which she has not, and decide if the author knew she had failed to answer them. (Shortform note: As you begin this process, you may also want to think about the subject as a whole and ask yourself: Are there any important ideas the author didn’t mention? Did she leave anything out? If so, how would that missing information change your impression of her argument?)

Complete Your Understanding First

Much like having a conversation with an author, Adler and Van Doren contend that you need to give the author the chance to express herself fully before passing judgment. If you interrupted the author at each sentence to say she’s wrong, you’re not having a conversation that can lead to learning. Therefore, you must finish the other tasks above (outlining the book, defining main terms, understanding the main arguments) before criticizing. Otherwise, your criticism will be meaningless because you won’t be criticizing the author’s actual argument.

(Shortform note: You’ll need to use your own best judgment to decide if you fully understand the author’s arguments. However, if you’re new to the book’s subject, you should be especially cautious about deciding you understand because the less you know about a subject, the more likely you are to overestimate your understanding. This is the essence of the Dunning-Kruger effect.)

How to Criticize Well

In Adler and Van Doren’s view, criticizing a book means to comment, “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.”

When you’re criticizing an author, Adler and Van Doren caution against being overly contentious or combative. A discussion isn’t something to be won: It’s an opportunity to discover the truth. Remember that disagreement is an opportunity to learn something new. Here are some tips for keeping an open mind:

• Do not play devil’s advocate by default. Don’t resent the author for being right or teaching you something new. (Shortform note: You may be especially tempted to resent the author when they challenge one of your political or religious beliefs. Studies have shown that these beliefs are the most resistant to change because they’re intimately tied up with how we see ourselves.)
• Only agree with the author if you’ve fully evaluated their work; don’t just assume the author is right because they’re smart. (Shortform note: This may be even harder (and thus even more important) for authors you respect and admire, as you might naturally evaluate those authors’ arguments less rigorously than authors with whom you disagree.)
• Separate your emotional reaction to the book from the rational one.
• As you read, earnestly try to take the author’s point of view.

Resolving Difficult Conversations With the Author

Separating your emotional reaction to a book from your intellectual reaction and trying to take the author’s point of view isn’t always easy, especially if the author’s argument threatens an aspect of your life or your identity. In that situation, it may help to think of yourself as entering into a difficult conversation with the author.

In Difficult Conversations, authors Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen offer advice for navigating these types of conversations:

• Remember that our individual experiences shape how we see the world. That means that whatever the author is saying probably isn’t meant as an attack on your principles or your identity; it’s a reflection of their own life experiences. Keeping this in mind can help you not take the author’s ideas personally.

• Acknowledge and express the feelings that come up as you read—otherwise, they’ll fester and keep you from evaluating the book with a clear head.

• Try out the “And Stance,” in which you acknowledge that several things can be true at once. For example, you might say, “This author has some good ideas, and some of her views are deeply intolerant” or “I’m a good person, and I’m guilty of the behavior this author is criticizing.” This allows you to see the bigger picture, not just the most difficult part.

Part 4: Comparative Reading

The first three levels of reading all focus on reading a singular text. Now, we’ll talk about applying those analytical skills across a multitude of texts. Adler and Van Doren call this “syntopical reading.” “Syntopical” is a neologism Adler’s Encyclopedia Britannica team invented; for simplicity, we’ll call this type of reading “comparative” reading.

Comparative reading aims to compare books and authors to one another, to model dialogues between authors that may not be in any one of the books. (Shortform note: In How to Read Literature Like a Professor, author Thomas C. Foster describes “intertextuality,” which is the common references and themes that exist across fiction books. Reading literature with an intertextual lens is similar to reading expository books comparatively.)

The ultimate aim is to understand all the conflicting viewpoints relating to a subject. Here are the major steps of comparative reading according to the authors. (Shortform note: Adler and Van Doren list these as a set of five steps, each containing many sub-steps. For clarity, we’ve expanded the list so that each step is one distinct action. See our full guide for specific tips on reading books in various genres, like fiction, science, and philosophy.)

1. Create a total bibliography of works that may be relevant to your subject.

• Many of the important works may not be obvious, since they may not have the keyword in their titles. (Shortform note: In established fields, look for a primer or brief history of your subject. This will give you an overview of the topic and help you identify additional sources.)

2. Inspect all of the books on your bibliography to decide which are relevant to your subject, and to better define the subject.

• As you research, you may find that your subject is more difficult to define than you imagined. For example, if your subject is World War II, you’ll have more material than you could possibly read. As you begin reading, the authors recommend narrowing down your subject.
• (Shortform note: The ultimate scope of your topic depends on your project. If you love history and want to know everything there is to know about World War II, you might keep the subject broad and make it a lifelong reading project. On the other hand, if your goal is to write a paper for a class, you may want to keep narrowing until you have just enough information to fill a set number of pages.)

3. Go through each book on your list and mark specific chapters or passages you intend to use.

• Keep in mind that only a portion of any given book may be relevant to your purposes. If you plan to read the whole book, read it quickly.
• You may use a syntopicon that organizes passages across works by subject, like Great Books of the Western World. (Shortform note: The “Syntopicon'' is a directory of “Great Ideas'' that includes every reference to those ideas across 431 “Great Books.” It took Adler and his team over 400,000 hours of reading and more than a decade to create.)

4. Develop a set of common terms and rephrase each author’s argument in that language.

• Authors in different fields may use entirely different terms that mean the same thing, and the same terms in different fields may mean entirely different things. (Shortform note: For scientific or technical topics, you may need to literally translate the author’s conclusions into a set of common units.)

5. Develop a set of questions that each author provides answers to.

• This may not be explicit—you may have to infer the author’s answer to a question she never directly considered. (Shortform note: Take your inferred answers with a grain of salt. Even if you’re well-versed in the work of a given author, it’s impossible to know for sure how that author would feel about a subject they never addressed.)

6. Get a sense of the complexity of the issues.

• See how each author answers the questions. If their answers are vastly different, it probably means that your question represents a particularly contentious issue in their field.
• (Shortform note: Another clue that you’ve stumbled on a contentious issue is if a lot of literature is published on that topic in a short amount of time (because authors are constantly rebutting each other). More informally, you may even look to social media or interviews with the authors to see whether they’re focused on rebutting another author’s ideas.)

7. Order the questions and issues to throw maximum light on the subject.

• Show how the questions are answered differently and say why.
• Avoid trying to assert the truth or falsity of any view—this fails the goal of the syntopic reading to be objective. According to the authors, full objectivity is difficult to maintain, and bias can show in subtle ways like the summarization of arguments and the ordering of answers. The antidote to this is constant reference to the actual text of the authors.
• (Shortform note: Keep in mind that bias can persist even when you’re actively trying to be objective. Psychologists have shown this through the Implicit Association Test, which tests implicit social biases. Participants know they’re being tested on bias (and therefore may be deliberately trying to appear unbiased), but those biases are so deeply rooted that they appear anyway.)

The authors suggest omitting imaginative works from comparative reading, because the propositions are obscured by plot and are rarely explicitly attributed to the author (a character’s speech could be satirical). (Shortform note: Including fiction in a comparative project is complicated indeed, but may still be valuable. For example, reading only historical accounts of 18th century English and Irish politics without reading Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (or of ancient Greece without reading the works of Homer or Sophocles) would be a major omission, despite the influence of fiction.)

Comparative Reading vs. Literature Review

In academic settings, literature reviews are a common undertaking. Literature reviews are similar to comparative reading projects in that the goal is to gain a wide understanding of what other thinkers have to say about a certain subject. Researchers conducting literature reviews often complete extra steps that Adler and Van Doren don’t mention in their discussion of comparative reading; however, these steps might be useful for comparative reading projects. For example:

• Define your inclusion criteria. Literature reviews have strict inclusion criteria to help determine which sources to use. For example, many literature reviews only pull sources from academic journals, not popular press books or even textbooks. If you need to narrow down your comparative reading bibliography, you might set similar parameters on the types of sources you want to use.

• Create a table to keep track of different authors’ viewpoints. This will help you keep all your information in one place as you work through your bibliography. You can even color code authors who are in favor of a certain issue or against it.

• Analyze the quality of your source. For scientific topics, researchers can do this mathematically by analyzing effect size and statistical significance. For qualitative topics, you might do this by researching the author. What is their experience in this subject? For translated texts, you might also research the translator and the history of translation for that specific text. Are there any passages that different translators have approached differently?