How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [43]
This does not mean that you should ignore chapter headings and sectional divisions made by the author; we did not ignore them in our analysis of the Constitution, although we did not slavishly follow them, either. They are intended to help you, just as titles and prefaces are. But you must use them as guides for your own activity, and not rely on them passively. There are few authors who execute their plan perfectly, but there is often more plan in a good book than meets the eye at first.
The surface can be deceiving. You must look beneath it to discover the real structure.
How important is it to discover that real structure? We think very important. Another way of saying this is to say that Rule 2-the requirement that you state the unity of a bookcannot be effectively followed without obeying Rule 3-the requirement that you state the parts that make up that unity.
You might, from a cursory glance at a book, be able to come up with an adequate statement of its unity in two or three sentences. But you would not really know that it was adequate.
Someone else, who had read the book better, might know this, and award you high marks for your efforts. But for you, from 90 HOW TO READ A BOOK
your point of view, it would have been merely a good guess, a lucky hit. This is why the third rule is absolutely necessary as a complement to the second one.
A very simple example will show what we mean. A twoyear-old child, just having begun to talk, might say that "two plus two is four." Objectively, this is a true statement; but we would be wrong to conclude from it that the child knew much mathematics. In fact, the child probably would not know what the statement meant, and so, although the statement by itself was adequate, we would have to say that the child still needed training in the subject. Similarly, you might be right in your guess about a book's main theme or point, but you still need to go through the exercise of showing how and why you stated it as you did. The requirement that you outline the parts of a book, and show how they exemplify and develop the main theme, is thus supportive of your statement of the book's unity.
The Reciprocal Arts of Reading and Writing In general, the two rules of reading that we have been discussing look as if they were rules of writing also. Of course they are. Writing and reading are reciprocal, as are teaching and being taught. If authors and teachers did not organize their communications, if they failed to unify them and order their parts, there would be no point in directing readers or listeners to search for the unity and uncover the structure of the whole.
Nevertheless, although the rules are reciprocal, they are not followed in the same way. The reader tries to uncover the skeleton that the book conceals. The author starts with the skeleton and tries to cover it up. His aim is to conceal the skeleton artistically or, in other words, to put flesh on the bare bones. If he is a good writer, he does not bury a puny skeleton under a mass of fat; on the other hand, neither should the flesh be too thin, so that the bones show through. If the flesh is thick X-Raying a Book 91
enough, and if flabbiness is avoided, the joints will be detectible and the motion of the parts will reveal the articulation.
Why is this so? Why should not an expository book, one that attempts to present a body of knowledge in an ordered way, be merely an outline of the subject? The reason is not only that most readers cannot read outlines, and that such a book would be repellent to a self-respecting reader who thought that if he could do his job, the author ought to do his.
There is more to it than that. The :O.esh of a book is as much a part of it as the skeleton. This is as true of books as it is of animals and human beings. The flesh-the outline spelled out,
"read out," as we sometimes say-adds an essential dimension.
It adds life, in the case of the animal. Just so, actually