Summer is usually a good season for reading. This summer is no exception.

Photo credit: Taylor Leopold

Earlier this year, I read How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles van Doren and learned a few things about reading.

1. Not all books should be read the same way.

   There was a time when I tried to read all books with the same approach and attention. Not any more. Tim Challies posted yesterday about the different levels of reading, so I won’t try to summarize those here.

2. There are very few good books. And only a few of those have the power to grow with you throughout your life.

   The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone — more than 99 per cent of them — will not make sufficient demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading.

   …

   There is a second class of books from which you can learn — both how to read and how to live. Less than one out of every hundred books belongs in this class…. They make severe demands on the reader. They are worth reading analytically — once.

   …

   Of the few thousand such books there is a much smaller number — here the number is probably less than a hundred — that cannot be exhausted by even the very best reading you can manage. How do you recognize this? … [W]hen you have closed the book after reading it analytically to the best of your ability, and place it back on the shelf, you have a sneaking suspicion that there is more there than you got.¹

3. Marking books is not sacrilegious. Instead, it is essential for active reading. You can read Adler’s classic piece on this here.

4. Reading many books is not important.

   It is easy for me to measure the success of my reading by how many books I read, but the authors would remind me that how many got through me is more important still. They have a great quote about halfway through:

   The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not necessarily mean that they read all the books that, in the day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well. Because they had mastered these books, they became peers with their authors. … In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author.

   Our intention here is not to lead you from reading to writing. It is rather to remind you that one approaches the ideal of good reading by applying the rules we have described in the reading of a single book, and not by trying to become superficially acquainted with a larger number. There are, of course, many books worth reading well. There is a much larger number that should be only inspected. To become well-read, in every sense of the word, one must know how to use whatever skill one possesses with discrimination — by reading every book according to its merits.²

References