How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [103]
Read quickly, we suggest, and with total immersion. We have indicated the importance of letting an imaginative book work on you. That is what we mean by the latter phrase. Let the characters into your mind and heart; suspend your disbelief, if such it is, about the events. Do not disapprove of something a character does before you understand why he does it-if then. Try as hard as you can to live in his world, not in yours; there, the things he does may be quite understandable. And do not judge the world as a whole until you are sure that you have "lived" in it to the extent of your ability.
Following this rule will allow you to answer the first question you should ask about any book-What is it about, as a whole? Unless you read it quickly you will fail to see the unity of the story. Unless you read intensely you will fail to see the details.
The terms of a story, as we have observed, are its characters and incidents. You must become acquainted with them, and be able to sort them out. But here a word of warning. To take War and Peace as an example, many readers start this great novel and are overwhelmed by the vast number of characters to whom they are introduced, especially since they all have strange-sounding names. They soon give up on the book in the belief that they will never be able to sort out all Suggestions for Reading Stories, Plays, and Poems 219
the complicated relationships, to know who is who. This is true of any big novel-and if a novel is really good, we want it to be as big as possible.
It does not always occur to such fainthearted readers that exactly the same thing happens to them when they move to a new town or pa1t of a town, when they go to a new school or job, or even when they arrive at a party. They do not give up in those circumstances; they know that after a short while individuals will begin to be visible in the mass, friends will emerge from the faceless crowd of fellow-workers, fellowstudents, or fellow-guests. We may not remember the names of everyone we met at a party, but we will recall the name of the man we talked to for an hour, or the girl with whom we made a date for the next evening, or the mother whose child goes to the same school as ours. The same thing happens in a novel. We should not expect to remember every character; many of them are merely background persons, who are there only to set off the actions of the main characters. However, by the time we have finished War and Peace or any big novel, we know who is important, and we do not forget. Pierre, Andrew, Natasha, Princess Mary, Nicholas-the names are likely to come immediately to memory, although it may have been years since we read Tolstoy's book.
We also, despite the plethora of incidents, soon learn what is important. Authors generally give a good deal of help in this respect; they do not want the reader to miss what is essential to the unfolding of the plot, so they flag it in various ways. But our point is that you should not be anxious if all is not clear from the beginning. Actually, it should not be clear then. A story is like life itself; in life, we do not expect to understand events as they occur, at least with total clarity, but looking back on them, we do understand. So the reader of a story, looking back on it after he has finished it, understands the relation of events and the order of actions.
All of this comes down to the same point: you must finish a story in order to be able to say �hat you have read it well.
220 HOW TO READ A BOOK
Paradoxically, however, a story ceases to be like life on its last page. Life goes on, but the story does not. Its characters have no vitality outside the book, and your imagination of what happens to them before the first page and after the last is only as good as the next reader's. Actually, all such speculations are meaningless. Preludes to Hamlet have been written, but they are ridiculous. We should not ask what happens to Pierre and Natasha after War and Peace