The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading
Mortimer Jerome Adler, Charles Lincoln Van Doren, Edward Holland: How to Read a Book (EBook, Blackstone Pub)
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Published by Blackstone Pub.
This is a great book. I've started and stopped this book at least twice before. I'm glad that I came back to it. This is an important book because he gives some basic rules to break down how to read books. But these rules are not the strictly followed for all books and the authors do a great job to acknowledge this.
While this book occasionally has good advice, it won't tell anything new to someone who studied at the college level. Indeed, everything said here is covered in the introductory Academic Writing courses, in a much more concise form.
The book is focused on reading and analysis a treatise-style nonfiction. While it does cover other genres and types of literature, it is much less useful there, and sometimes the authors grasp on the other genres is lacking. It also assumes that the reader is reading for enlightenment - is doing the difficult, laborious work of reading that is supposed to leave the reader a better and wiser person. It has little to say about reading for pleasure - and does not claim to. But the side-effect of that focus is that using the author's method is guaranteed to suck the pleasure out of reading even if you are the kind of …
While this book occasionally has good advice, it won't tell anything new to someone who studied at the college level. Indeed, everything said here is covered in the introductory Academic Writing courses, in a much more concise form.
The book is focused on reading and analysis a treatise-style nonfiction. While it does cover other genres and types of literature, it is much less useful there, and sometimes the authors grasp on the other genres is lacking. It also assumes that the reader is reading for enlightenment - is doing the difficult, laborious work of reading that is supposed to leave the reader a better and wiser person. It has little to say about reading for pleasure - and does not claim to. But the side-effect of that focus is that using the author's method is guaranteed to suck the pleasure out of reading even if you are the kind of person that reads treatises for fun.
