How to Read a Book (A Touchstone book)

I read several pages of an online version of this book (which is available for free in its entirety on the internet) and found no part of it to be interesting or insightful in the least. I checked the book's excerpt on Amazon and confirmed that it was indeed the same text.

Many years ago I read a book called "How to Get Your Point Across in 30 Seconds or Less" where one of the main ideas was that you have to make a point that the audience cares about every 30 seconds or you will lose your audience (that may not apply when one is dealing with some overly academic types or people who have tons of time on their hands and really like to read). But for my money and time, had Mortimer Adler been able to read that book before writing his book telling us how to read, he might have produced a book that I could have found interesting.

I would recommend the prospective buyer of this book read Amazon's preview excerpt of this book. After reading the excerpt, ask yourself what you could share with a friend about what you have read--or even what might be useful for others to know. That's a simple enough test, and maybe you'll like it. I didn't.

As someone who reads about a book a week, I wish I had been introduced to this work when I was in high school. The book teaches the very basic and fundamental steps that need to be taken to get the most out of reading a book. It's not just a matter of mechanically going through the book and getting the most you can via your recollection and knowledge; it requires more rigorous application of steps such as understanding the author's terms, propositions and conclusions and then deciding for yourself whether and why and to what extent you agree with the author or not. The discussion on syntopical reading is invaluable: the authors encourage and motivate readers to add their own insights and possibly expand the discussion and even add new knowledge to a field of experise via the reading and analysis of many books on the same topic. I think many casual readers feel that they are only receptors of the information and, because they are not certified on or in some way credentialed in a particular field, they have nothing to offer to the evolution of the discussion. The book also offers a humbling reminder to avid readers: you can read a lot and still not be well read; that is, if you are not in some way satisfying your reading appetite with some of the world's great works, you may be filling yourself but not getting all the intellectual nutrition you need.

Recently started grad school and this book has given me good tips on getting through the 400+ pages of reading that has to be done each week. Well worth the money.

The author makes many good points about reading skillfully, including how to determine if you should bother reading a particular book.

The main point is that different books should be read differently. If you agree with that premise, this book will train you how to do it. If, on the other hand, you read the USA Today the same way you would read the Communist Manifesto or a technical journal, then you may have no use for the book.

Unfortunately, Adler is a little wordy at times, but the book contains instructions on how to deal with verbose authors too!

I hate to say this, but I think maybe I found this book too late. I majored in English as an undergrad, and had learned most of these strategies the hard way. I really was excited about this book and wanted to get into it, but I found myself employing the book's strategies while reading the book. I skimmed, I skipped sections that struck me as repetitive, and critically analyzed the book as I went along.