How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [38]
You do not always have to find out the unity of a book 1ll by yourself. The author often helps you. Sometimes, the title is all you have to read. In the eighteenth century, writers had the habit of composing elaborate titles that told the reader what the whole book was about. Here is a title by Jeremy Collier, an English divine who attacked what he considered to be the obscenity-we would say pornography, perhaps-of Restoration drama much more learnedly than is customary nowadays : A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, together with the Sense of Antiquity upon this Argument. You can guess from this that Collier recites many flagrant instances of the abuse of morals and that he supports his protest by quoting texts from those ancients who argued, as Plato did, that the stage corrupts youth, or, as the early Church fathers did, that plays are seductions of the flesh and the devil.
Sometimes the author tells you the unity of his plan in his 80 HOW TO READ A BOOK
preface. In this respect, expository books differ radically from fiction. A scientific or philosophical writer has no reason to keep you in suspense. In fact, the less suspense he keeps you in, the more likely you are to sustain the effort of reading him through.
Like a newspaper article, an expository book may summarize itself in its first paragraph.
Do not be too proud to accept the author's help if he proffers it, but do not rely too completely on what he says in the preface, either. The best-laid plans of authors, like those of mice and other men, often go awry. Be guided by the prospectus the author gives you, but always remember that the obligation of finding the unity belongs finally to the reader, as much as the obligation of having one belongs to the writer. You can discharge that obligation honestly only by reading the whole book.
The introductory paragraph of Herodotus' history of the war between the Greeks and the Persians provides an excellent summary of the whole. It runs:
These are the researches of Herodotus of Halicamassus, which he publishes, in the hope of thereby preserving from decay the remembrance of what men have done, and of preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and the Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory; and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud.
That is a good beginning for you as a reader. It tells you succinctly what the whole book is about.
But you had better not stop there. After you have read the nine parts of Herodotus' history through, you will probably find it necessary to elaborate on that statement to do justice to the whole. You might want to mention the Persian kings
Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes; the Greek heroes of the war-primarily Themistocles; and the major events-the crossing of the Hellespont and the decisive battles, notably Thermopylae and Salamis.
All the rest of the fascinating details, with which Herodo-X-Raying a Book 81
tus richly prepares you for his climax, can be left out of your summary of the plot. Note, here, that the unity of a history is a single thread of plot, very much as in fiction. So far as unity is concerned, this rule of reading elicits the same kind of answer in history and in fiction.
A few more illustrations may suffice. Let us take a practical book first. The unity of Aristotle's Ethics can be stated thus :
This is an inquiry into the nature of human happiness and an analysis of the conditions under which happiness may be gained or lost, with an indication of what men