How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [45]
Nevertheless, even with a poetical work, it is often extremely helpful to try to say what the author was trying to do. In the case of expository works, the rule has obvious merit. And yet most readers, no matter how skilled in other respects, very often fail to observe it. As a result, their con�eption of a book's main point or theme may be extremely deficient, and of course their outline. of its structure will be chaotic. They will fail to see the unity of a book because they do not see why it has the unity it has; and their apprehension of the book's skeletal structure will lack comprehension of the end that it serves.
If you know the kinds of questions anyone can ask about anything, you will become adept in detecting an author's problems. They can be formulated briefly: Does something exist? What kind of thing is it? What caused it to exist, or under what conditions can it exist, or why does it exist? What purpose does it serve? What are the consequences of its existence? What 94 HOW TO READ A BOOK
are its characteristic properties, its typical traits? What are its relations to other things of a similar sort, or of a different sort?
How does it behave? These are all theoretical questions. What ends should be sought? What means should be chosen to a given end? What things must one do to gain a certain objective, and in what order? Under these conditions, what is the right thing to do, or the better rather than the worse? Under what conditi_ons would it be better to do this rather than that?
These are all practical questions.
This list of questions is far from being exhaustive, but it does represent the types of most frequently asked questions in the pursuit of theoretical or practical knowledge. It may help you discover the problems a book has tried to solve. The questions have to be adapted when applied to works of imaginative literature, and there too they will be useful.
The First Stage of Analytical Reading
We have now stated and explained the first four rules of reading. They are rules of analytical reading, although if you inspect a book well before reading it, that will help you to apply them.
It is important at this point to recognize that these first four rules are connected and form a group of rules having a single aim. Together, they provide the reader who applies them with a knowledge of a book's structure. When you have applied them to a book, or indeed to anything fairly lengthy and difficult that you may be reading, you will have accomplished the first stage of reading it analytically.
You should not take the term "stage" in a chronological sense, unless perhaps at the very beginning of your exercise as an analytical reader. That is, it is not necessary to read a book through in order to apply the first four rules, then to read it again and again in order to apply the other rules. The practiced reader accomplishes all of these stages at once. Never-X-Raying a Book 95
theless, you must realize that knowing a book's structure does constitute a stage toward reading it analytically.
Another way to say this is that applying these first four rules helps you to answer the first basic question about a book. You will recall that that first question is: What is the book about as a whole? You will also recall that we said that this means discovering the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics. Clearly, applying the first four rules of reading will provide most of what you need to know in order to answer this question-although it should be pointed out that your answer will improve in accuracy