Begin How to Read a Book

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+## How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
+
+by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
+
+### Part 1: The Dimensions of Reading
+
+#### Chapter 1: The Activity and Art of Reading
+
+* We do not need to know everything about something in order to understand it. Too many facts are often as confusing as too few.
+
+##### Active Reading
+
+* Successful communication is when what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader's possession. The writer's skill and the reader's skill converge upon a common end.
+* Active reading entails means one can read something better by first reading it more actively, and second by performing each of the acts involved more skillfully.
+
+##### The Goals of Reading: Reading for Information and Reading for Understanding
+
+* Your success in reading is determined by the extent to which you receive everything the writer wanted to communicate.
+* The art of reading is whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no outside help, elevates itself by the power of its own operations.
+* By performing the various acts that make up the art of reading, the mind passes from understanding less to understanding more.
+* Reading for understanding happens when the writer is "superior" to the reader in understanding, and the reader is able to overcome this inequality in understanding by some degree.
+
+##### Reading as Learning: The Difference Between Learning by Instruction and Learning by Discovery
+
+* To be informed is to know that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about.
+* Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
+* Being informed is a prerequisite to being enlightened. But you should not stop at being informed.
+* Learning by instruction happens when one teaches another through speech or writing. Learning by discovery happens when one learns something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.
+* Instruction is really "aided discovery" – although the teacher may help his student in many ways, it is the student himself who must do the learning.
+* Unaided discovery is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.
+* The art of reading includes all the same skills as the art of unaided discovery: Keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and intellect trained in analysis and reflection.
+
+##### Present and Absent Teachers
+
+* Listening is learning from a teacher who is present, while reading is learning from one who is absent.
+* If you ask a book a question, *you must answer it yourself*. In this respect a book is like nature or the world.
+
+#### Chapter 2: The Levels of Reading
+
+* There are four levels of reading which are cumulative, where higher levels include all the lower ones:
+* The first level is *Elementary Reading*, where the reader asks "What does the sentence say?" And this is asked in the simplest sense.
+* The second level is *Inspectional Reading*, where the goal is to get the most out of the book within a short period of time. By definition, it is too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.
+* Inspectional reading is the art of *skimming systematically*, and the reader asks "What is this book about?"
+* Readers who don't employ inspectional reading must achieve superficial knowledge of a book *at the same that they are trying to understand it*, compounding the difficulty.
+* The third level is *Analytical Reading*, which is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.
+* Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding. The reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading.
+* The fourth level is *Syntopical Reading*, where the reader reads many books and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve.
+* The syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that *may not be in any of the books*.