Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book - Lecture I (Patreon)

Today we're breaking down Mortimer Adler's instructive and insightful guide for deep reading - How to Read a Book.

In this first lecture, we will be covering the four levels of reading, coming to terms with an author, pigeonholing books, immersion and unity, questions demanding readers must ask, agreeing and disagreeing with authors, and much more.

You can listen to the audio without having read the book, but if you would like a copy of your own I recommend the revised edition of this classic:

• How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler 

We have topic timestamps below, so feel free to jump to any part that most interests you.

Audio Timestamps

• 0:00 ‘How to Read a Book’ by Mortimer Adler
• 2:00 primary vs secondary reading
• 3:00 the Oxford University workload
• 5:00 rules for non-fiction vs imaginative literature
• 6:45 reading “over one’s head”
• 9:58 the four levels of reading
• 11:00 the Great Books of the Western World
• 13:00 informed vs enlightened
• 13:45 the Feynman Technique
• 14:30 an exercise for improving your retention
• 17:00 learning to read our books well
• 18:30 how Oxford filtered applicants out
• 20:00 aided/facilitated discovery
• 22:30 questions demanding readers must ask
• 27:00 elementary reading (level one)
• 27:30 inspectional reading (level two)
• 28:00 systematic skimming
• 30:00 analytical reading (level three)
• 32:00 syntopical reading (level four)
• 33:00 how to write a good thesis
• 36:00 the habit of skimming/pre-reading
• 37:00 Daniel Defoe and Cormac McCarthy
• 41:00 how to read a university textbook
• 41:45 how to conduct a superficial reading
• 42:20 reading a Shakespeare play with immersion
• 44:00 reading in a single sitting
• 46:00 different reading paces (and speed-reading)
• 48:00 reading the Declaration of Independence
• 49:00 the importance of defining your terms
• 49:45 the different kinds of note-taking
• 52:00 Aristotle on habits
• 54:00 analytical reading and classifying our books
• 57:00 an orienting question for book reviews
• 1:00:00 the problems with pigeonholing books
• 1:03:00 making the poetic practical
• 1:04:00 how to x-ray a book
• 1:04:30 how to state the unity of a book
• 1:07:00 unity reading exercise
• 1:10:00 telling the same story in different ways
• 1:12:00 discovering the author’s intentions
• 1:15:00 being part of the greatest conversation
• 1:16:00 pausing upon difficult terms
• 1:17:00 agreeing or disagreeing with an author
• 1:18:00 latent vs manifest meaning
• 1:19:00 abandoning books due to disagreement
• 1:20:00 how to read imaginative literature

Questions for You

1) What has been your experience with reading poems, short stories, and plays? How do you typically read them?

2) Which of the techniques covered thus far are you most keen to put into practice? And what book will you try them on?

Happy reading, everybody!