• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

of them. Inspectional reading will not acquaint you with all of the intricacies of the subject matter, or with all of the insights that your authors can provide, but it will perform two essential functions. First, it will give you a clear enough idea of your subject so that your subsequent analytical reading of some of the books on the list is productive. And second, it will allow you to cut down your bibliography to a more manageable size.

We can hardly think of any advice that would be more useful for students, especially graduate and research students, than this, if they would only heed it. In our experience, a certain number of students at those advanced levels of schooling The fourth level of Reading: Syntopical Reading 315

have some capability of reading actively and analytically.

There may not be enough of them, and they may be far from perfect readers, but they at least know how to get at the meat of a book, to make reasonably intelligible statements about it, and to fit it into a plot or plan of their subject matter. But their efforts are enormously wasteful because they do not understand how to read some books faster than others. They spend the same amount of time and effort on every book or article they read. As a result, they do not read those books that deserve a really good reading as well as they deserve, and they waste time on works that deserve less attention.

The skill inspectional reader does more than classify a book in his mental card catalogue, and achieve a superficial knowledge of its contents. He also discovers, in the very short time it takes him to inspect it, whether the book says something important about his subfect or not. He may not yet know what that something is precisely-that discovery will probably have to wait for another reading. But he has learned one of two things. Either the book is one to which he must return for light, or it is one that, no matter how enjoyable or informative, contains no enlightenment and therefore does not have to be read again.

There is a reason why this advice is often unheeded. In the case of analytical reading, we said that the skilHul reader performs concurrently steps that the beginner must treat as separate. By analogy, it might seem that this kind of prepararation for syntopical reading-the inspection of all of the books on your list before starting the analytical reading of any of them-could be done concurrently with analytical reading. But we do not believe that can be done by any reader, no matter how skill. And this indeed is the mistake that so many younger researchers make. Thinking they can collapse these two steps into one, they end up reading everything at the same rate, which may be either too fast or too slow for a particular work, but in any event is wrong for most of the books they read.

Once you have identified, by inspection, the books that are 316 HOW TO READ A BOOK

relevant to your subject matter, you can then proceed to read them syntopically. Note that in the last sentence we did not say "proceed to read them analytically," as you might have expected. In a sense, of course, you do have to read each of the individual works that, together, constitute the literature of your subject, with those skills that you acquired by applying the rules of analytical reading. But it ·must never be forgotten that the art of analytical reading applies to the reading of a single book, when understanding of that book is the aim in view. As we will see, the aim in syntopical reading is quite different.

The Five Steps in Syntopical Reading

We are now prepared to explain how to read syntopically.

We will assume ,that, by your inspection of a number of books, you have a pretty good idea of the subject that at least some of them are about, and furthermore that this is the subject you want to investigate. What, then, do you do?

There are five steps in syntopical reading. We shall not call them rules, although we might, for if any of the steps is not taken, syntopical reading becomes