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A good book does reward you for trying to read it. The best books reward you most of all. The reward, of course, is of two kinds. First, there is the improvement in your reading skill that occurs when you successfully tackle a good, difficult work. Second-and this in the long run is much more important

-a good book can teach you about the world and about your-

Reading and the Growth of the Mind 341

self. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable-books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

There are some human problems, after all, that have no solution. There are some relationships, both among human beings and between human beings and the nonhuman world, about which no one can have the last word. This is true not only in such fields as science and philosophy, where it is obvious that final understanding about nature and its laws, and about being and becoming, has not been achieved by anyone and never will be; it is also true of such familiar and everyday matters as the relation between men and women, or parents and children, or man and God. These are matters about which you cannot think too much, or too well. The greatest books can help you to think better about them, because they were written by men and women who thought better than other people about them.

The Pyramid of Books

The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone-more than 99

per cent of them-will not make sufficient demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading. This may seem like a distressing fact, and the percentages may seem an overestimate.

But obviously, considering the numbers involved, it is true.

These are the books that can be read only for amusement or information. The amusement may be of many kinds, and the information may be interesting in all sorts of ways. But you should not expect to learn anything of importance from them. In fact, you do not have to read them-analytically-at all. Skimming will do.

There is a second class of books from which you can learn

342 HOW TO READ A BOOK

-both how to read and how to live. Less than one out of every hundred books belongs in this class-probably it is more like one in a thousand, or even one in ten thousand. These are the good books, the ones that were carefully wrought by their authors, the ones that convey to the reader significant insights about subjects of enduring interest to human beings. There are in all probably no more than a few thousand such books. They make severe demands on the reader. They are worth reading analytically-once. If you are skillful, you will be able to get everything out of them that they can give in the course of one good reading. They are books that you read once and then put away on your shelf. You know that you will never have to read them again, although you may return to them to check certain points or to refresh your memory of certain ideas or episodes. ( It is in the case of such books that the notes you make in the margin or elsewhere in the volume are particularly valuable. )

How do you know that you do not ever have to read such books again? You know it by your own mental reaction to the experience of reading them. Such a book stretches your mind and increases your understanding. But as your mind stretches and your understanding increases, you realize, by a process that is more or less mysterious, that you are not going to be changed any more in the future by this book. You realize that you have grasped the book in its entirety. You have milked it dry. You are grateful to it for what it has given you, but you know it has no more to give.

Of the few thousand such books there is a much smaller number-here the number is probably less than a hundredthat cannot be exhausted by even the very best reading you can manage. How do you recognize this? Again it is rather mysterious,