Do you know how to read a book?

Until recently, I excluded popular non-fiction books from my personal reading. I'm not sure why. Somewhere along the line I lumped it all in with the worst of the"self-help" books—the "win friends in 10 easy steps", "learn Russian in your sleep", "blink and be thin" variety—giving non-fiction as a whole a whiff of desperation and self-delusion. Plus, if I'm surrounded by scientific papers at work all day, why bring other poorly-written, dry-as-toast non-fiction home to read? Or so I thought.

Then I met Stephan and his annoying habit of learning in his spare time. His bookshelf was mostly non-fiction and contained intriguing titles like Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds, A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink and Design for How People Learn by Julie Dirksen. I began to leaf through a few. Soon I was reading them in earnest. How did I miss all these great books for so long?

The most influential so far has been How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren. When I picked this one up, I thought "this'll be a breeze, I'm already an ace at reading". Wrong; at least in part. For example, does this sound familiar to you:

"most people, even most good readers....start a book on page one and plow steadily through it, without even reading the table of contents."

Yup, that was me. A table of contents was a roadmap I used after I'd gotten lost in the book or wanted to skip to a specific chapter or topic. And page one? Of course I started on page one, it's the first page. I'm not an anarchist. So what's wrong with plowing through a book?

"...They [readers] are thus faced with the task of achieving a superficial knowledge of the book at the same time they are trying to understand it. That compounds the difficulty."

Crap, I thought, I do that too. I remembered recently reading a book about teaching that had a long story about playing chess, full of cognitive psychology jargon. I didn't see what the story had to do with teaching and I actually quit the book because it annoyed me so much.

Clearly I could learn a thing or two from HTRAB. So I read on. What I found was a clear, logical breakdown of what the authors consider to be the four levels of reading: elementary, inspectional, analytical and syntopical. The levels build upon each other: elementary is putting the words and sentences together, inspectional is skimming with a purpose, analytical is question-based reading for understanding an author's arguments and syntopical* is, well, hard. The level used depends on what you goal is—reading for entertainment, for factual information, or for conceptual understanding.

Inspectional and analytical reading were the most interesting to me. I won't go into too much detail today except to touch upon inspectional reading, or skimming systematically.

Before HTRAB, I thought skimming was something done in an aimless, haphazard way, like flipping to a random page or scanning for the pretty pictures. Turns out skimming, if done purposefully. can be a powerful way to get a sense of a book before diving into the details. Whatever amount of time you have—15 minutes, an hour—can be tailored to an effective inspectional read. No surprise, a great place to start is the table of contents. Also the index: which terms have lots of page references (therefore are most commonly used)? What kinds of examples are given? Do you recognize any specific people listed?

I used to think skimming was lazy, something you wouldn't do if you were serious about a book. Now, I skim every non-fiction book before I read it, even if only for a few minutes. I find it so helpful for understanding the general message and style of an author.

I think I'll write more about HTWAB in future posts. For now, I'll end with the greatest insight it gave me: I wasn't giving any thought to how I read a book. Sure, I used bits and pieces of inspectional and analytical reading here and there—sometimes I haphazardly skimmed, sometimes I took notes and tried to pay attention to every word—but I never reflected on why I used the technique I did, or when. In other words, there was nothing deliberate to how I read a book; I just read.

Now I am conscious of how I read. I might be giving a new book a 15-minute inspectional read to see if it's worth investing more time, I might be delving more deeply into a book that I want to learn from, taking notes and trying to understand the author's main points, or I might be reading for entertainment and just dive in at page one. Regardless, I think I'm finally getting better at reading all the non-fiction books Stephan brings home. Turns out they're not all about dieting.

Two of my favourite non-fiction books.

*One final note: The fourth level of reading, syntopical, is the Everest of reading. Not only is it a hard word to say—syntopical—it's hard to do. Read a bunch of things analytically while simultaneously comparing it to similar works, creating a synthesis of the field. In grad school this is what you're supposed to do, only no one shows you how. And now I find out there are instructions?! God dammit.