How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [90]
We have stated the rules of analytical reading generally so that they apply to any expository book-any book that conveys knowledge, in the sense in which we have been using that term. But you cannot read a book in general. You read this book or that, and every particular book is of a particular sort.
It may be a history or a book in mathematics, a political tract or a work in natural science, or a philosophical or theological treatise. Hence, you must have some flexibility and adaptability in following the rules. Fortunately, you will gradually get the feeling of how they work on different kinds of books as you apply them.
It is important to note here that the fifteen rules of reading, in the form in which they were presented toward the end of Chapter 11, do not apply to the reading of fiction and poetry.
The outlining of the structure of an imaginative work is a different matter from the outlining of an expository book. Novels 1 91
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and plays and poems do not proceed by terms, propositions, and arguments-their fundamental content, in other words, is not logical, and the criticism of such works is based on different premises. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that no rules at all apply to reading imaginative literature. In fact, there is a parallel set of rules for reading such books that we will describe in the next chapter. These are useful in themselves; but the examination of them and their differences from the rules for reading expository works also throws light on the latter rules.
You need not fear that you will have to learn a whole new set of fifteen or more rules for reading fiction and poetry. The connection between the two kinds of rules is easy to see and state. It consists in the underlying fact, which we have emphasized over and over, that you must ask questions when you read, and specifically that you must ask four particular questions of whatever you are reading. These four questions are relevant to any book, whether fiction or nonfiction, whether poetry or history or science or philosophy. We have seen how the rules of reading expository works connect with and are developed from these four questions. Similarly, the rules of reading imaginative literature are also developed from them, although the difference in the nature of the materials read causes some dissimilarities in the development.
That being the case, in this part of the book we will have more to say about these questions than about the rules for reading. We will occasionally refer to a new rule, or to a revision or adaptation of an old one. But most of the time, as we proceed to suggest approaches to the reading of different kinds of books and other materials, we will emphasize the different questions that must be primarily asked, and the different kinds of answers that can be expected.
In the expository realm, we have noted that the basic division is into the practical and the theoretical-books that are concerned with the problems of action, and books that are concerned only with something to be known. The theoretical is How to Read Practical Books 1 93
further divisible, as we have noted, into history, science ( and mathematics ) , and philosophy. The practical division cuts across all boundaries, and we therefore propose to examine the nature of such books a little further, and to suggest some guidelines and precautions when you read them.
The Two Kinds of Practical Books
The most imporant thing to remember about any practical book is that it can never solve the practical problems with which it is concerned. A theoretical book can solve its own problems. But a practical problem can only be solved by action itself. When your practical problem is how to earn a living, a book on how to make friends and influence people cannot solve it, though it may suggest things to do. Nothing short of the doing solves the problem. It is solved only