How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [160]
lytical and syntopical reading, does not apply to every book.
The reason is that some books do not require it.
We have made this point before, but we want to make it now again because of its relevance to the task that lies before you. If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article. You will not improve as a reader if all you read are books that are well within your capacity. You must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.
Thus, it becomes of crucial importance for you not only to be able to read well but also to be able to identify those books that make the kinds of demands on you that improvement in reading ability requires. A book that can do no more than amuse or entertain you may be a pleasant diversion for an idle hour, but you must not expect to get anything but amusement from it. We are not against amusement in its own right, but we do want to stress that improvement in reading skill does not accompany it. The same goes for a book that merely informs you of facts that you did not know without adding to your understanding of those facts. Reading for information does not stretch your mind any more than reading for amusement. It may seem as though it does, but that is merely because your mind is fuller of facts than it was befor�
you read the book. However, your mind is essentially in the same condition that it was before. There has been a quantitative change, but no improvement in your skill.
We have said many times that the good reader makes demands on himself when he reads. He reads actively, effortfully. Now we are saying something else. The books that you will want to practice your reading on, particularly your analytical reading, must also make demands on you. They must seem to you to be beyond your capacity. You need not fear that they really are, because there is no book that is completely out of your grasp if you apply the rules of reading to it that we have 340 HOW TO READ A BOOK
described. This does not mean, of course, that these rules wil accomplish immediate miracles for you. There are certainly some books that wil continue to extend you no matter how good a reader you are. Actually, those are the very books that you must seek out, because they are the ones that can best help you to become an ever more skillful reader.
Some readers make the mistake of supposing that such books-the ones that provide a constant and never-ending challenge to their skill-are always ones in relatively unfamiliar fields. In practice, this comes down to believing, in the case of most readers, that only scientific books, and perhaps philosophical ones, satisfy the criterion. But that is far from the case. We have already remarked that the great scientific books are in many ways easier to read than non-scientific ones, because of the care with which scientific authors help you to come to terms, identify the key propositions, and state the main arguments. These helps are absent from poetical works, and so in the long run they are quite likely to be the hardest, the most demanding, books that you can read. Homer, for example, is in many ways harder to read than Newton, despite the fact that you may get more out of Homer the first time through. The reason is that Homer deals with subjects that are harder to write well about.
The difficulties that we are talking about here are very different from the difficulties that are presented by a bad book.
It is hard to read a bad book, too, for it defies your efforts to analyze it, slipping through your fingers whenever you think you have it pinned down. In fact, in the case of a bad book, there is really nothing to pin down. It is not worth the effort of trying. You receive no reward