How To Read A Book

1. What is the book about as a whole?

Practical book with tips and examples on how to read books for understanding

2. What is being said in detail, and how?

It's important to take notes and reproduce in your own words what you read. If you can't explain it in your own words, you dont' understand it.

A reader should aim to answer the 4 questions in this document for every book. There are different types of books and there are some caveats for each type - fiction, philosophy, science, etc.

Try to stretch your mind - read what seems challenging and hard to understand. If you understand everything on the first pass, you aren't aiming high enough (or are reading a bad book).

There are 4 levels of reading - elementary (being able to read at all), inspectional (skimming to quickly identify key information), analytical (where you really understand and can answer questions) and syntopical (reading many books to understand a specific topic).

For analytical reading, it is important to understand the language of the writer. You should be able to distill the main idea and reference where the author says it. Then, you should be able to criticize or agree. You can't abstain - "I don't have critique and I disagree" means you didn't grasp the book. Moreover, if you don't have a valid critique, that means you should take some action based on the advice from the book.

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?

The book has valid points. I agree with the classification of the reading levels and that a book must challenge you if you want to get something out of it. That's something I agreed on prior to opening the book.

I agree about reproducing the main idea of the book in my own terms - that is something I haven't been doing and I realize sometimes that means I haven't fully grasped something. Again, that is something I agreed on prior to the book but I haven't been applying the idea to reading books.

About analytical reading - the part I'm most concerned about - I think that taking action isn't always necessary. To me it's perfectly valid that I might agree that something is true but doesn't apply to me - and I found the provided example with cooking recipes outrageous. There is a lot more nuance than someone who doesn't do X reading about doing X and I find that X being cooking denied this conversation.

For example, using the author's own terms and paragraphs to illustrate his points can be self-indulgent - you can always find something to highlight, some paragraph that the author says something. But there is absolutely no certainty that it is the main one of the book. An analysis should be able to reference but a valuable analysis should be able to distill using my own terms; without parroting the words of the author. In fact, How to Read a Book made the very same point and still argued in the importance of repeating using author's terms.

4. What of it?

I will keep this repository of questions. The book convinced me of the real value in using my own words to reproduce an argument that I found important.

However, I won't go through the trouble of implementing every advice of the book. Highlighting and writing on the pages can help someone but that would absolutely change my preferred method of reading - lying in bed or in public transportation, with Kindle.