On "How to Read a Book"

The source material for this madness. 

Mortimer J. Adler's How to Read a Book first attracted my eye because I found the concept amusing. I mean, a book about how to read books? Its so meta that the little philosopher inside me couldn't resist picking it up. Adler's concern is not only that people aren't reading enough, but that the way they read is insufficient. At best, Adler figures that the average reader only reads for information, not understanding. As a professor, he found that even when his students could recall the words of a text, they failed to grasp the meaning of those words on any significant level. Adler believes that that the reason for this is that they simply were never taught (properly) how to read past a 3rd or 4th grade level; they could read words, but they couldn't really read books. In addition, Adler was concerned that academic culture has stopped valuing the properly liberal education, in which students read the great works in order to become thoroughly educated citizens. Instead of learning the foundations of history, science, philosophy, and literature, the modern student (rather arbitrarily) chooses a subject to specialise in and memorises the factoids necessary to pass exams. Mr. Adler finds this system to be thoroughly flawed. Firstly, students of this system are left with major gaps in their education: The engineer doesn't understand the political system she's ruled by, the philosopher fails to grasp the biology of life he's bound to, and the historian cannot know much about the psychologies that compel herself (or the subjects of her history). Secondly, Adler is concerned that the lack of reading skill in students means that they barely have any understanding of even their own chosen subjects.

The System

So, we don't know how to read, great. What do we do? How do we read a book? Adler comes up with a way to read in order to train oneself to read habitually well. To read not just for amusement or basic information, but for understanding, even enlightenment. To do this at first (before the method becomes ingrained into a habit), Adler demands that a work be read three times (yikes!). The first to Analyse the book: to figure out its type and genre, to know its major parts and the parts of those parts, and to determine what problems the text is trying to solve. The second is to Interpret the book: to learn the vital terms the author uses, the important propositions, and their arguments, and to determine which problems the author has succeeded in solving. And the third to Criticise the book: to show where the author may be uniformend, misinformed, illogical, or incomplete.

Mr. Adler looking stately.
I'd wear those glasses.

To do all this requires focused, active reading. And piles of notes and summations. So, the question for me becomes: what do I post here? If (IF!) I dare to make these notes, I doubt they'd be very interesting to read for you, the illustrious blog-reader; therefore, I doubt I'd post them directly to this blog. Possibly I could link the notes in Google Drive format for those masochistic types who would want to read them (again, if I actually attempt to make such thorough notes).

For the sake of this blog, I'm going to read the books as best as I can each week and then comment on them here. Perhaps I'll try to cover the "critisism" phase of the reading here. I'll run through how I felt by what was said, what significance the ideas might have, and how they relate to me.  Thoughts and feelings, and what-not. Thoughts and Feelings.

Yup.

So that's the Friday plan. The first proper book will be Homer's Iliad, which should be fun because as a work of fiction, Mr. Adler's system doesn't fully apply. He does make some notations on what to do in fiction's case though, so I'll work it out.

Monday's post will be a week review, and perhaps the always dramatic story of the relationship I have with my credit union. Unclear about Wednesday. Stay tuned.