How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [29]
they are true in some sense, conveys knowledge in this meaning of knowledge and is an expository work. As with fiction, most people know an expository work when they see it. Here, however, the problem is not to distinguish nonfiction from fiction, but to recognize that there are various kinds of expository books. It is not merely a question of knowing which books are primarily instructive, but also which are instructive in a particular way. The kinds of information or enlightenment that a history and a philosophical work afford are not the same.
The problems dealt with by a book on physics and one on morals are not the same, nor are the methods the writers employ in solving such different problems.
Thus this first rule of analytical reading, though it is applicable to all books, applies particularly to nonfictional, expository works. How do you go about following the rule, particularly its last clause?
As we have already suggested, you do so by first inspecting the book-giving it an inspectional reading. You read the title, the subtitle, the table of contents, and you at least glance at the preface or introduction by the author and at the index.
If the book has a dust jacket, you look at the publisher's blurb.
These are the signal flags the author waves to let you know which way the wind is blowing. It is not his fault if you will not stop, look, and listen.
What You Can learn from the Ti tle of a Book The numbers of readers who pay no attention to the signals is larger than you might expect. We have had this experience again and again with students. We have asked them what a book was about. We have asked them, in the most general terms, to tell us what sort of book it was. This is a good way, almost an indispensable way, to begin a discussion of a book.
Nevertheless, it is often hard to get any kind of answer to the question.
Let us take a couple of examples of the kind of confusion 62 HOW TO READ A BOOK
that can occur. In 1859, Darwin published a very famous book.
A century later the entire English-speaking world celebrated the publication of the book. It was discussed endlessly, and its influence was assessed by learned and not-so-learned commentators. The book was about the theory of evolution, and the word "species" was in the title. What was the title?
Probably you said The Origin of Species, in which case you were correct. But you might not have said that. You might have said that the title was The Origin of the Species. Recently, we asked some twenty-five reasonably well-read persons what the title of Darwin's book was and more than haH
said The Origin of the Species. The reason for the mistake is obvious; they supposed, never having read the book, that it had something to do with the development of the human species. In fact, it has little or nothing to do with that subject, which Darwin covered in a later book, The Descent of Man.
The Origin of Species is about what its title says it is aboutnamely the proliferation in the natural world of a vast number of species of plants and animals from an originally much smaller number of species, owing mainly to the principle of natural selection. We mention this common error because many think they know the title of the book, although few have actually ever read the title carefully and thought about what it means.
Here is another example. In this case we will not ask you to remember the title, but to think about what it means.
Gibbon wrote a famous, and famously long, book about the Roman Empire. He called it The Decline and FaU of the Roman Empire. Almost everybody who takes up the book recognizes that title; and most people, even without the book in their hand, know the title. Indeed, the phrase "decline and fall" has become proverbial. Nevertheless, when we asked the same twenty-five well-read people why the first