Book Review: How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

by Alliene Turner

Alliene is an EBSTC Senior Member and long-time East Bay resident. She is the managing editor of this newsletter and runs an online bookstore, http://turnerbookstore.com.

How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren Available through Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

I was browsing through a magazine recently and saw a review about one of my favorite books, How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. This is a revised edition. The original edition was written in 1940, updated in 1967, and then again in 1972. I wasn't surprised to see this classic being reviewed. It provides a wealth of information about how to approach reading and understanding books.

X-Ray a Book

You can dip into How to Read a Book and learn skills like how to pigeon-hole and X-ray a book; that is, analyze the type and quality of a book by reviewing its title, table of contents, and index for its organization.

Adler uses a house as an analogy to judge the quality of a book: "There is a difference between a heap of bricks…and the single house they can constitute….A good book, like a good house, is an orderly arrangement of parts." These parts may have a certain amount of independence, but in the end, the parts must be connected or related and "contribute to the intelligibility of the whole."

Read Analytically

As a technical writer, I used the lessons learned from this book to help me structure my documents. I always kept Adler's house analogy in mind when evaluating my foundation (outline and research), and then reviewed how well the rooms (parts and chapters) interconnected as I went along. I tried to objectively pigeon-hole and X-ray the book when it was complete, to see if it stood up to Adler's test of quality.

Now as a bookseller, I am using the books' lessons to choose quality books to sell.

Buy This Book

Adler lived a long and very productive life, and wrote many, many books, mostly about philosophy. I did a quick check online. New and used copies of How to Read a Book, as well as other very readable classics from this author, are still available. I highly recommend his work to the serious reader and writer.