Saturday 8 May 2010

How To Read A Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren

As both my regular readers will know, sometimes I worry that I just don’t get major works of literature. Either the entire literary establishment is wrong or I am. Bearing in mind my tendency to write loops that never exit, I think it’s probably me. A couple of years ago, I hoped John Sutherland would tell me what I was doing wrong but he was peddling the politically correct line about how everyone’s opinion is equally valid.

If there is one thing that How To Read a Book is not, it’s politically correct. For example, the authors write “men” when they mean “people” and the tone of the whole book is generally like being lectured by the kind of pipe-smoking old man who belongs to a dining club. Here’s a taste,

“…most readers are at a total loss if you ask them to say briefly what the whole book is about. Partly this is owing to the widespread inability to speak concise English sentences.”

Woah… That’s me put in my rambling, ungrammatical place! Still, the book was published in the 70s; maybe slagging off your readers was OK back then. The gist of the book is that despite reading all the time, most of us never lift our comprehension above the level that we achieved in Primary School. Not only is there a lot of finger-wagging in their style, but there are actually a series of exercises in the back of the book!

At least there are some things I've been doing right: my approach to fiction which is to read it as quickly as possible, desperate to find out what happens, living in the imaginary world of the book and allowing the author to manipulate my emotions is apparently exactly how first readings should be done. The trouble is that I should then go back over it and start deconstructing but I can rarely be arsed. I also have their permission to carry on marking pages and writing in the margins of my books - their you go E, I'm not just an uncultured vandal! One of the things I've been doing wrong for years is missing out the introductions, prefaces and so forth. My rationale was that the book should stand or fall on its own merit and shouldn't have to be propped up by various bits of extraneous crap. I have now been firmly ticked off and informed that these are proper parts of the book and not optional extras.

According to the authors, there are 4 questions which you should ask when you read a book: What's it about as a whole? What are the detailed arguments? Is it true? and so what? They also define 4 levels of reading:

  1. Elementary Reading – understanding the words you read
  2. Inspectional Reading – using indexes, contents, and scanning
  3. Analytical Reading – understanding. Looking at structure. Making judgements & drawing conclusions
  4. Syntopical reading – what I would call “reading around” a subject. The only time I’ve ever done this was for A level history!

Don’t panic if you didn’t know what “syntopical” meant. They made it up. They also believe that syntopical reading is aided by using the Sytopicon - a new kind of reference book designed by Adler to allow readers to look up sections of famous texts by subject or idea. It sounds pretty horrific to use in book form so no wonder they're trying to drum up some sales here. I think it might work a lot better as a website, though, so maybe this is an idea who's time has finally come.

Despite the fact that this is less of a book and more a series of tellings-off, there are still some pretty inspirational bits. Apparently, up until the 20th century, books on science, maths and philosophy were intended to be read by intelligent lay readers rather than experts so there is no reason that with a bit of work any of us shouldn't be able to understand the works of Euclid or Plato or Darwin. Imagine reading Euclid!

In brief: I can’t like these guys, but I suspect that they’re right. I've certainly trundled through enough books half asleep and come out the other end non the wiser.

Suspecting isn’t enough though – I am a woman of science! I must therefore put “How to Read a Book” to the test: Having finished it, I now plan to try to put these techniques into practise by reading one of the truly scary books from my shelf which I’ve been putting off for years, “The Prince” by Machievelli . Stay tuned to see whether I manage to make head or tail of it, or whether I just go back to reading children’s books…