Cecily's Reviews > How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

Who This Book is (not) For

It focuses mainly on reading expositional, rather than imaginative material. It was written in 1940, and revised in 1972, though it looks and feels more like a 40s book.

I read it in the hope of becoming a more analytical reader who could go on to write more coherent, concise, and original reviews. It didn’t help. A much more relevant book is How to Read Literature Like a Professor, which I've reviewed HERE.

This may once have been a good book. Had I read it as an undergraduate, I may even have found bits of it slightly useful. As a middle-aged fiction reader in the 21st century, I found it infuriating, boring, and mostly irrelevant.

Types of Reading

There are four levels of reading:
1. Elementary (learning to decode the symbols).
2. Inspectional (time-limited skimming).
3. Analytical.
4. Syntopical (comparing and drawing conclusions).
I used Inspectional for most of the book - because my patience and interest were severely, and increasingly, limited.

It focuses mainly on analytical reading of non-fiction: knowing what sort of book it is, having an idea of the content and structure etc. Its own structure is very poor. For example, four rules of analytical reading are spread across two chapters, and only listed together at the end of the second. Then, in the next chapter, you discover rule five, and six… It turns out there are 15 (yes, 15!) rules of analytical reading. Enough to put me off reading altogether.

There are a couple of chapters devoted to fiction, but I didn’t find them helpful or insightful.

Example of Annoyances

“Most plays are not worth reading… because they are incomplete.”
Sweeping generalisation followed by a non-sequitur. I rarely read plays precisely because they were written for performance, and I can’t do that effectively in my head. It does not mean that most plays are not worth reading, though.

“An author uses most words as men ordinarily do in conversation.”
I nearly threw the book across the room, though that was probably an overreaction, born of my mounting dislike. Yes, I know it was written when it was more common to use male pronouns as generic ones, and to use “man” to mean “mankind/humankind”. But it was revised in 1972, and “men” grates far more than “man”: surely “people” would be more natural, even back then?

The Literary Canon (only one?!)

I don’t think the authors really know who their audience is - a fatal flaw in any writer/reader relationship. There are constant assumptions that the reader is familiar with the classical Western canon, from ancient civilisations, through to the start of the twentieth century: Homer’s Ulysses, though to Joyce’s Ulysses. If you’d read them in school (as the authors expect), you’d either have understood them and so have little need of this book, or not understood them, and have no intention of reading this book.

This is reflected in the impressive and somewhat daunting reading list. It explicitly includes only Western works because:
1. The authors admit they know very little about Indian, Chinese, Japanese and other literary traditions. (They could have consulted someone else.)
2. Apparently, there is not a single tradition in Eastern literature, as there is in Western. (I’m not sure I understand the truth or untruth of that.)
3. It’s better to really know your own culture’s canon before branching out to others. (I don’t agree, but it is a valid and somewhat interesting opinion.)

Exercises

An appendix has a lot of comprehension exercises (I’m not sure what term is used outside the UK). I didn’t do any of them. I’d rather read a good book.

If you want to read a book, I suggest you read a book.
But probably not this one.
If you want exercises, make it a large, heavy one!