How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [95]
There is one apparent exception to this contention. Suppose, for example, that you read an article about how to make a chocolate mousse. You like chocolate mousse, and so you agree with the author of the article that the end in view is good. You also accept the author's proposed means for attaining the end-his recipe. But you are a male reader who never goes into the kitchen, and so you do not make a mousse. Does this invalidate our point?
It does not, although it does indicate an important distinction between types of practical books that should be mentioned. With regard to the ends proposed by the authors of such works, these are sometimes general or universal-applicable to all human beings-and sometimes applicable only to a certain portion of human beings. If the end is universal-as it is, for example, with this book, which maintains that all persons should read better, not just some-then the implication discussed in this section applies to every reader. If the end is selective, applying only to a certain class of human beings, 202 HOW TO READ A BOOK
then the reader must decide whether or not he belongs to that class. If he does, then the implication applies to him, and he is more or less obligated to act in the ways specified by the author. If he does not, then he may not be so obligated.
We say "may not be so obligated" because there is a strong possibility that the reader may be fooling himself, or misunderstanding his own motives, in deciding that he does not belong to the class to which the end is relevant. In the case of the reader of the article about chocolate mousse, he is probably, by his inaction, expressing his view that, although mousse is admittedly delicious, someone else-perhaps his wife-should be the one to make it. And in many cases, we concede the desirability of an end and the feasibility of the means, but in one way or another express our reluctance to perform the action ourselves. Let someone else do it, we say, more or less explicitly.
This, of course, is not primarily a reading problem but rather a psychological one. Nevertheless, the psychological fact has bearing on how effectively we read a practical book, and so we have discussed the matter here.
1 4
HOW TO READ
IMAG I NATIVE LITERATURE
So far, this book has been concerned with only half the reading that most people do. Even that is too liberal an estimate. Probably the greater part of anybody's reading time is spent on newspapers and magazines, and on things that have to be read in connection with one's job. And so far as books are concerned, most of us read more fiction than nonfiction. Furthermore, of the nonfiction books, the most popular are those that, like newspapers and magazines, deal journalistically with matters of contemporary interest.
We have not deceived you about the rules set forth in the preceding chapters. Before undertaking to discuss them in detail, we explained that we would have to limit ourselves to the business of reading serious nonfiction books. To have expounded the rules for reading imaginative and expository literature at the same time would have been confusing. But now we cannot ignore the other types of reading any longer.
Before embarking on the task, we want to emphasize one rather strange paradox. The problem of knowing how to read imaginative literature is inherently much more difficult than the problem of knowing how to read expository books. Nevertheless, it seems to be a fact that such skill is more widely possessed than the art of reading science and philosophy, politics, economics, and history. How can this be true?
203
204 HOW TO READ A BOOK
It may be, of course, that people deceive themselves about their ability to read novels intelligently. From our teaching experience, we know how tongue-tied people become when asked to say what they liked about a novel. That they enjoyed it