How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [176]
If you have done reasonably well in answering the test questions, it must be obvious to you that you are a pretty wellrounded reader and that you have reached and even exceeded the standards set for Elementary Reading. We hope you have also recognized that these exercises and tests were designed not only to improve your skill as a reader but also to help you learn something worth knowing, or to apply something you already know to what you read.
I I . Exercises and Tests at the Second Level of Reading: l nspectional Reading
The tables of contents of two works included in Great Books of the Western World are used as texts for reading and 378 HOW TO READ A BOOK
testing in this section of Appendix B. In addition, short biographical sketches of their authors-Dante and Darwin-are also reprinted here, for the reader's information and also as material from which test questions are drawn.
The biography of Dante and the table of contents of his Divine Comedy are taken from Volume 21 of Great Books of the W estem World. That volume contains only the Divine Comedy. But Dante wrote other works, in prose and verse, of great interest and beauty, although only his Comedy ( the adjective "Divine" was added after his death ) is widely read today.
You will recall, from Chapter 4, that there are two steps in lnspectional Reading. The first we called Pre-Reading or Skimming; the second, Superficial Reading. As we do not have the entire text of the Divine Comedy before us for this sample reading exercise, we will treat the table of contents of the work, given here in its entirety, as though it were a book in itself. That is, we suggest that you spend less than ten minutes (here, speed is of the essence ) systematically skimming the whole table of contents, after which you can try answering some questions; and then we will ask you to read the table of contents over again superficially-that is, in about twenty minutes-and then answer some more questions.
The total reading time to be devoted to the table of contents of the Divine Comedy is therefore half an hour. Considering that scholars have devoted thirty years of their lives to the Divine Comedy, we dare say that thirty minutes of inspection is indeed superficial. At the same time, it is not presumptuous or vain. One can learn a lot about this great poem in half an hour. And as to those for whom Dante and the Divine Comedy are vague names at best, a careful inspection of the table of contents may induce them to inspect the whole work, or even lead them on to read the whole analytically, at the third level of reading.
Before giving the table of contents your first inspectionbefore either pre-reading or systematically skimming it-read the biographical note about Dante in a few minutes. It will Appendix B 379
help you understand what Dante is planning and doing in the Divine Comedy-and also help you to answer some of our questions.
DANTE ALIGHIERI
1265-1321
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence about the middle of May, 1265. The city, then under its first democratic constitution, was sharply divided between the Papal party of the Guelphs and the Imperial party of the Ghibellines. Dante's family were adherents of the Guelph faction, and when Dante was only a few months old, the Guelphs obtained decisive victory at the Battle of Benevento. Although of noble ancestry, the Alighieri family was neither wealthy nor particularly prominent.
It seems probable that Dante received his early education at the Franciscan school of Santa Croce. He evidently owed much to the influence of Brunetto Latini, the philosopher and scholar who figured largely in the councils of the Florentine commune. Before Dante was twenty, he began writing poetry and became associated with the Italian