# How to Read a Book > Markdown version of https://brajeshwar.com/2026/how-to-read-a-book/ — 2026-07-31 > Or, what forty years of reading did not teach me. After decades of reading books, I have decided to finally learn [How to Read a Book](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book). There is a particular kind of embarrassment in that sentence, and I have made my peace with it. [Mortimer J. Adler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortimer_J._Adler) published it in 1940. He revised it in 1972 with [Charles Van Doren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Van_Doren)[^vandoren], and that is the edition I read, and most likely the one you have too. It is not a book about loving books. It is closer to a manual, written by a man who believed reading is a skill, that most adults quietly stopped learning it somewhere around the sixth grade, and that this was worth being blunt about. He splits reading into four levels, each one folded into the next. **Elementary** is what school gave you. What does the sentence say? Most of us stopped here and have been coasting ever since. **Inspectional** is reading on a budget. Systematic skimming (the table of contents, the index, the preface, a paragraph here and there) to answer one question: what kind of book is this, and does it deserve more of my life? Adler is emphatic that this is a real skill and not cheating. **Analytical** is the heart of the book and most of its pages. You classify the book, work out its structure, come to terms with the author[^terms], which means agreeing on what his words mean before you argue with them, and only then judge it. The rule I keep returning to is his one about disagreement: you must be able to say “I understand” before you are allowed to say “I agree,” “I disagree,” or “I suspend judgment.” **Syntopical** is reading many books on one subject and building an understanding that sits in none of them individually. It is the hardest, and it is the one that actually changes how you think. ## So, What Now? Well, the book is kind of a slog. There is a real irony in a book about reading being this hard to finish. It is repetitive, fond of its own taxonomy, and the 137-title reading list at the back[^greatbooks] is Homer-to-Solzhenitsyn Western canon in a way that has aged into a period piece. Of course, the ideas are what you take away from the book. Inspectional reading gave me permission to stop apologizing for skimming. “Come to terms with the author” has made me a better arguer and a much slower one. What follows is my own take: the whys, and some of the hows, gathered over years of reading and of stealing good ideas from the Internet. ## Why Read? 1. Reading well will deepen your appreciation of literature; you’ll gain new experiences and enrich your knowledge of the world and other people. 2. Reading well requires noticing details, reflecting on them and questioning them. 3. One key to reading well and pleasurably is to slow down, take your time and read deliberatively. 4. Re-reading literary texts will allow you to pick up on what you missed the first time around and deepen your reading pleasure. 5. Reading aloud, whether a sentence or an entire page, will help you notice more about a writer’s craft and art, especially how the tone and texture complement the meaning. ## How to read books the right way 1. Pick up multiple books (physical, digital, or audio) from the same topic or category to go deeper. This is Adler’s syntopical reading, and you can start it without his permission. 2. It is OK not to finish a book you don’t like. 3. Some books are more flexible and might not be read linearly. It does depend on the topic of the book you’re reading. It’s okay to pick up chapters if the book is meant to be a collection of answers to unrelated topics. 4. Write notes, highlight them, or stick tiny stickies on pages (for physical books). 5. You can speed-read[^speed-read] parts and sections that might not be useful to remember. 6. While reading you might come across topics you don’t know much about. While you’re still finishing the book, read a brief summary to get through the current content. Write them down separately to research more later. 7. Try to write a summary after you’ve read the whole book. 8. Find your format/style or mix them up: digital, physical, audio. ## Tips Here are a few personal tips that worked for me while trying to read and learn the contents of books and get the best out of them. This will help you overcome the habit of `Tsundoku`[^tsundoku]. - Read reviews, from multiple sources, of a book and try to know a general idea of the content and idea of that book. - Or listen to audio books at about 1.2x speed. You can use whatever you are comfortable with: a headphone, or in your car. - Once you have either read the reviews or heard the audio book, decide if you want to read the book or not. When you do read it, either physical or digital, but now you know which part to browse and which part to concentrate on. That last one is inspectional reading wearing a disguise, which I did not know until I read Adler. I had spent years arriving at a worse version of a method somebody wrote down before my parents were born. That is either humbling or reassuring, and most days I take it as both. [^vandoren]: [Charles Van Doren](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Van_Doren) is a strange co-author for this particular book. In 1957 he won $129,000 on the NBC quiz show *Twenty-One* and made the cover of Time, and in November 1959 he told a Congressional subcommittee that he had been given the questions and answers in advance. “I was involved, deeply involved, in a deception.” He joined Encyclopædia Britannica the same year, worked alongside Adler for the next two decades, and thirteen years after the confession co-wrote the standard book on reading honestly. [^terms]: “Coming to terms” is Adler’s pun and his fifth rule of analytical reading. A term, for him, is not a word but a word used with a single unambiguous meaning. When the writer and the reader are using the important words the same way, they have come to terms, in both senses. [^greatbooks]: The list is the short version of [Great Books of the Western World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Books_of_the_Western_World), the 54-volume set Adler edited with Robert Hutchins in 1952. Its first two volumes are the *Syntopicon*, an index not of words but of 102 ideas, cross-referencing every mention of each one across the whole set. It took eight years and a staff of indexers, and it is the most literal thing anyone has ever built for syntopical reading. [^speed-read]: [Speed Reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading) is the technique of chunking and minimizing subvocalization. The many available speed-reading training programs may utilize books, videos, software, and seminars. There is little scientific evidence regarding speed reading, and as a result its value seems uncertain. [^tsundoku]: [Tsundoku](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsundoku) (Japanese: 積ん読) is the art of buying books and never reading them.