How To Read a Book

Key Takeaways

Under Consideration — to be added.

Interconnections

Under Consideration — to be added.

Highlights

As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, “When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing.”
The average high school graduate has done a great deal of reading, and if he goes on to college he will do a great deal more; but he is likely to be a poor and incompetent reader.
He can follow a simple piece of fiction and enjoy it. But put him up against a closely written exposition, a carefully and economically stated argument, or a passage requiring critical consideration, and he is at a loss.
especially the problem of how to read a number of related books in relation to one another and read them in such a way that the complementary and conflicting things they have to say about a common subject are clearly grasped.
But it may be seriously questioned whether the advent of modern communications media has much enhanced our understanding of the world in which we live.
We do not have to know everything about something in order to understand it; too many facts are often as much of an obstacle to understanding as too few. There is a sense in which we moderns are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding.
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day.
But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up his own mind at all. Instead, he inserts a packaged opinion into his mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. He then pushes a button and “plays back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. He has performed acceptably without having had to think.
One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort. He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.
Reading and listening are thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court. On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.
The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different.
It is noteworthy that the pitcher and catcher are successful only to the extent that they cooperate.
Let us even assume—what unhappily is not always true—that you understand enough to know that you do not understand it all. You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding.
- “Known unknowns”
Without external help of any sort, you go to work on the book. With nothing but the power of your own mind, you operate on the symbols before you in such a way that you gradually lift yourself from a state of understanding less to one of understanding more. Such elevation, accomplished by the mind working on a book, is highly skilled reading, the kind of reading that a book which challenges your understanding deserves.
- “Feast on the word”
a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand. Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing.
In short, we can learn only from our “betters.”
To be informed is to know simply that something is the case. To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.
Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.” The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all. The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books. They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.
In the history of education, men have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.
- Intrinsic motivation; learning for the learning, not the test
Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
- Learning, No Greater Responsibility
A doctor may do many things for his patient, but in the final analysis it is the patient himself who must get well—grow in health. The farmer does many things for his plants or animals, but in the final analysis it is they that must grow in size and excellence. Similarly, although the teacher may help his student in many ways, it is the student himself who must do the learning. Knowledge must grow in his mind if learning is to take place.
We must think in the course of reading and listening, just as we must think in the course of research. Naturally, the kinds of thinking are different—as different as the two ways of learning are.
- Aided and unaided learning; thinking while reading / listening vs. thinking while researching
The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection.
If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.
The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading.
In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills.
At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is “What does the sentence say?”
The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading. It is characterized by its special emphasis on time.
Still another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.
The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading.
Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.
Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.
The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading.
When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve. But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books. It is obvious, therefore, that syntopical reading is the most active and effortful kind of reading.
The first stage is known by the term “reading readiness.”
Reading readiness includes several different kinds of preparation for learning to read. Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing. Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it. Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly and to use several sentences in correct order. Personal readiness involves the ability to work with other children, to sustain attention, to follow directions, and the like.
In the second stage, children learn to read very simple materials. They usually begin, at least in the United States, by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year. Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words. By the end of this period pupils are expected to be reading simple books independently and with enthusiasm.
The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in “unlocking” the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues.
Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired. Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences—that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject. This, the mature stage of reading, should be reached by young persons in their early teens. Ideally, they should continue to build on it for the rest of their lives.
The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences. The second stage—word mastery—corresponds to the first grade experience of the typical child (although many quite normal children are not “typical” in this sense), with the result that the child attains what we can call second-stage reading skills, or first grade ability in reading or first grade literacy. The third stage of elementary reading—vocabulary growth and the utilization of context—is typically (but not universally, even for normal children) acquired at about the end of the fourth grade of elementary school, and results in what is variously called fourth grade, or functional, literacy—the ability, according to one common definition, to read traffic signs or picture captions fairly easily, to fill out the simpler government forms, and the like. The fourth and final stage of elementary reading is attained at about the time the pupil leaves or graduates from elementary school or junior high school. It is sometimes called eighth grade, ninth grade, or tenth grade literacy. The child is a “mature” reader in the sense that he is now capable of reading almost anything, but still in a relatively unsophisticated manner. In the simplest terms, he is mature enough to do high school work.
A good liberal arts high school, if it does nothing else, ought to produce graduates who are competent analytical readers. A good college, if it does nothing else, ought to produce competent syntopical readers.
We must be more than a nation of functional literates. We must become a nation of truly competent readers, recognizing all that the word competent implies. Nothing less will satisfy the needs of the world that is coming.
- Connect to Russel M. Nelson - “it will be impossible to survive spiritually…”
Giving a book this kind of quick once-over is a threshing process that helps you to separate the chaff from the real kernels of nourishment. You may discover that what you get from skimming is all the book is worth to you for the time being. It may never be worth more. But you will know at least what the author’s main contention is, as well as what kind of book he has written, so the time you have spent looking through the book will not have been wasted.
LOOK AT THE TITLE PAGE AND, IF THE BOOK HAS ONE, AT ITS PREFACE.
STUDY THE TABLE OF CONTENTS
Milton, for example, wrote more or less lengthy headings, or “Arguments,” as he called them, for each book of Paradise Lost. Gibbon published his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire with an extensive analytical table of contents for each chapter.
- Similar to Jesus the Christ
CHECK THE INDEX
The passages you read may contain the crux—the point on which the book hinges—or the new departure which is the key to the author’s approach and attitude.
the book is a new one with a dust jacket, READ THE PUBLISHER’S BLURB.
It is not uncommon for authors to try to summarize as accurately as they can the main points in their book. These efforts should not go unnoticed.
Of course, if the blurb is nothing but a puff for the book, you will ordinarily be able to discover this at a glance. But that in itself can tell you something about the work. Perhaps the book does not say anything of importance—and that is why the blurb does not say anything, either.
From your general and still rather vague knowledge of the book’s contents, LOOK NOW AT THE CHAPTERS THAT SEEM TO BE PIVOTAL TO ITS ARGUMENT.
Finally, TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT.
Few authors are able to resist the temptation to sum up what they think is new and important about their work in these pages. You do not want to miss this, even though, as sometimes happens, the author himself may be wrong in his judgment.
Incidentally, this is a very active sort of reading. It is impossible to give any book an inspectional reading without being alert, without having all of one’s faculties awake and working.
In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.
And even if you never go back, understanding half of a really tough book is much better than not understanding it at all, which will be the case if you allow yourself to be stopped by the first difficult passage you come to.
The tremendous pleasure that can come from reading Shakespeare, for instance, was spoiled for generations of high school students who were forced to go through Julius Caesar, As You Like It, or Hamlet, scene by scene, looking up all the strange words in a glossary and studying all the scholarly footnotes. As a result, they never really read a Shakespearean play. By the time they reached the end, they had forgotten the beginning and lost sight of the whole.
Instead of being forced to take this pedantic approach, they should have been encouraged to read the play at one sitting and discuss what they got out of that first quick reading. Only then would they have been ready to study the play carefully and closely because then they would have understood enough of it to learn more.
- Is reading something together a [[Skill Tree]]? Picture a class all collectively staring at a google doc. The ability to read things through, comment, highlight, bold, reference, take notes. What is that skill?
Like having a group discussion, is there a system?
Take a basic work in economics, for example, such as Adam Smith’s classic The Wealth of Nations. (We choose this book as an example because it is more than a textbook or a work for specialists in the field. It is a book for the general reader.) If you insist on understanding everything on every page before you go on to the next, you will not get very far. In your effort to master the fine points, you will miss the big points that Smith makes so clearly about the factors of wages, rents, profits, and interest that enter into the cost of things, the role of the market in determining prices, the evils of monopoly, the reasons for free trade. You will miss the forest for the trees. You will not be reading well on any level.
It is true enough that many people read some things too slowly, and that they ought to read them faster. But many people also read some things too fast, and they ought to read those things more slowly.
Every book, no matter how difficult, contains interstitial material that can be and should be read quickly; and every good book also contains matter that is difficult and should be read very slowly.
Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.
do not try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. This is the most important rule of all; it is the essence of inspectional reading. Do not be afraid to be, or to seem to be, superficial.
Systematic skimming, in other words, anticipates the comprehension of a book’s structure. And the second stage of inspectional reading—the stage we have called superficial reading—serves the reader when he comes to the second stage of reading at the analytical level. Superficial reading is the first necessary step in the interpretation of a book’s contents.
- Surgical reading
Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.
WHAT IS THE BOOK ABOUT AS A WHOLE? You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics. 2. WHAT IS BEING SAID IN DETAIL, AND HOW? You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message. 3. IS THE BOOK TRUE, IN WHOLE OR PART? You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough. 4. WHAT OF IT? If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.
- 4 - “therefore what?”
And that is why there is all the difference in the world between the demanding and the undemanding reader. The latter asks no questions—and gets no answers.
If you have the habit of asking a book questions as you read, you are a better reader than if you do not.
When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.
The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.
But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying.
- Learning, No greater responsibility
The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?
There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion—the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them.
Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operating according to its rules. This is the way the artist or craftsman in any field differs from those who lack his skill.
- Connect to Da Vinci book; true masters first learn the rules so that they can break them
The difference between your activity before and after you have formed a habit is a difference in facility and readiness. After practice, you can do the same thing much better than when you started. That is what it means to say practice makes perfect. What you do very imperfectly at first, you gradually come to do with the kind of almost automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were born to it, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is second nature.
- Deliberate practice in knowledge work
Incidentally, not everyone understands that being an artist consists in operating according to rules. People point to a highly original painter or sculptor and say, “He isn’t following rules. He’s doing something entirely original, something that has never been done before, something for which there are no rules.” But they fail to see what rules it is that the artist follows. There are no final, unbreakable rules, strictly speaking, for making a painting or sculpture. But there are rules for preparing canvas and mixing paints and applying them, and for molding clay or welding steel. Those rules the painter or sculptor must have followed, or else he could not have made the thing he has made. No matter how original his final production, no matter how little it seems to obey the “rules” of art as they have traditionally been understood, he must be skilled to produce it.
It is relatively easy to think of and be conscious of physical acts. It is much harder to think of mental acts, as the beginning analytical reader must do; in a sense, he is thinking about his own thoughts. Most of us are unaccustomed to doing this.
Reading a short story is almost always easier than reading a novel; reading an article is almost always easier than reading a book on the same subject. If you can read an epic poem or a novel, you can read a lyric or a short story; if you can read an expository book—a history, a philosophical work, a scientific treatise—you can read an article or abstract in the same field.
RULE 1. YOU MUST KNOW WHAT KIND OF BOOK YOU ARE READING, AND YOU SHOULD KNOW THIS AS EARLY IN THE PROCESS AS POSSIBLE, PREFERABLY BEFORE YOU BEGIN TO READ.
To make knowledge practical we must convert it into rules of operation. We must pass from knowing what is the case to knowing what to do about it if we wish to get somewhere. This can be summarized in the distinction between knowing that and knowing how. Theoretical books teach you that something is the case. Practical books teach you how to do something you want to do or think you should do.
- Therefore what? - it is not enough to know, we must do
Anyone who writes practically about anything not only tries to advise you but also tries to persuade you to follow his advice.
A practical book will soon betray its character by the frequent occurrence of such words as “should” and “ought,” “good” and “bad,” “ends” and “means.” The characteristic statement in a practical book is one that says that something should be done (or made); or that this is the right way of doing (or making) something; or that one thing is better than another as an end to be sought, or a means to be chosen. In contrast, a theoretical book keeps saying “is,” not “should” or “ought.” It tries to show that something is true, that these are the facts; not that things would be better if they were otherwise, and here is the way to make them better.
Similarly, although understanding is primarily and usually a theoretical matter, there are books (most of them are terrible) that purport to teach you “how to think.”
The essence of history is narration. History is knowledge of particular events or things that not only existed in the past but also underwent a series of changes in the course of time. The historian narrates these happenings and often colors his narrative with comment on, or insight into, the significance of the events.
If a theoretical book emphasizes things that lie outside the scope of your normal, routine, daily experience, it is a scientific work. If not, it is philosophical.
Now, just as there is a difference in the art of teaching in different fields, so there is a reciprocal difference in the art of being taught. The activity of the student must somehow be responsive to the activity of the instructor. The relation between books and their readers is the same as that between teachers and their students. Hence, as books differ in the kinds of knowledge they have to communicate, they proceed to instruct us differently; and, if we are to follow them, we must learn to read each kind in an appropriate manner.
- Learning, no greater responsibility
RULE 2. STATE THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE BOOK IN A SINGLE SENTENCE, OR AT MOST A FEW SENTENCES (A SHORT PARAGRAPH).
- Progressive summarization.
You must be able to tell yourself or anybody else what the unity is, and in a few words. (If it requires too many words, you have not seen the unity but a multiplicity.) Do not be satisfied with “feeling the unity” that you cannot express. The reader who says, “I know what it is, but I just can’t say it,” probably does not even fool himself.
RULE 3. SET FORTH THE MAJOR PARTS OF THE BOOK, AND SHOW HOW THESE ARE ORGANIZED INTO A WHOLE, BY BEING ORDERED TO ONE ANOTHER AND TO THE UNITY OF THE WHOLE.
There are two things we want you to note before we proceed. The first is how frequently you can expect the author, especially a good one, to help you to state the plan of his book. Despite that fact, most readers are at a total loss if you ask them to say briefly what the whole book is about.
The second point is a word of caution. Do not take the sample summaries we have given you as if they were, in each case, a final and absolute formulation of the book’s unity. A unity can be variously stated.
You are a finite, mortal creature; but a book is also finite and, if not mortal, at least defective in the way all things made by man are. No book deserves a perfect outline because no book is perfect. It goes only so far, and so must you.
Aquinas, for instance, begins each section of his commentary with a beautiful outline of the points that Aristotle has made in a particular part of his work; and he always says explicitly how that part fits the structure of the whole, especially in relation to the parts that come before and after.
Just so, actually writing the book from an outline, no matter how detailed, gives the work a kind of life that it would not otherwise have had.
If, after you have attained sufficient skill, no amount of effort on your part results in your apprehension of the unity of a book, and if you are also not able to discern its parts and their relation to one another, then very likely the book is a bad one, whatever its reputation.
In fact, whatever your own failings as a reader, the fault is usually in the book, for most books—the very great majority—are badly made books in the sense that their authors did not write them according to these rules.
- Connect to “why books don’t work”
RULE 4. FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR’S PROBLEMS WERE.
The author of a book starts with a question or a set of questions. The book ostensibly contains the answer or answers.
- Find the reference; what question would I have to ask for this scripture to be the answer?
Unless the reader comes to terms with the author, the communication of knowledge from one to the other does not take place. For a term is the basic element of communicable knowledge.
word. If the author uses a word in one meaning, and the reader reads it in another, words have passed between them, but they have not come to terms.
Where there is unresolved ambiguity in communication, there is no communication, or at best communication must be incomplete.
So long as ambiguity persists, there is no meaning in common between writer and reader. For the communication to be successfully completed, therefore, it is necessary for the two parties to use the same words with the same meanings—in short, to come to terms.
- D&C 50:21-22 - reading and writing
Coming to terms is the ideal toward which writer and reader should strive. Since this is one of the primary achievements of the art of writing and reading, we can think of terms as a skilled use of words for the sake of communicating knowledge.
- The vainest of talking for the sake of talking. Righteous communication seeks to be understood
RULE 5. FIND THE IMPORTANT WORDS AND THROUGH THEM COME TO TERMS WITH THE AUTHOR.
There is no use crying about it, no use making up impossible schemes for an ideal language, as the philosopher Leibniz and some of his followers have tried to do. Indeed, if they succeeded, there would be no more poetry. The only thing to do, therefore, in expository works, is to make the best of language as it is, and the only way to do that is to use language as skillfully as possible when you want to convey, or to receive, knowledge.
- Adamic language
The likelihood of a meeting of minds through language depends on the willingness of both reader and writer to work together.
- D&C 50:21-22 - this should be one big section. It should combine the idea of “learning, no greater responsibility” and reading / writing from [[Roam Brainstorm]]
Just as teaching will not avail unless there is a reciprocal activity of being taught, so no author, regardless of his skill in writing, can achieve communication without a reciprocal skill on the part of readers.
- Learning, no greater responsibility
If that were not so, the diverse skills of writing and reading would not bring minds together, however much effort was expended, any more than the men who tunnel through from opposite sides of a mountain would ever meet unless they made their calculations according to the same principles of engineering.
So far as communication is concerned, both steps are indispensable. If language is used without thought, nothing is being communicated. And thought or knowledge cannot be communicated without language. As arts, grammar and logic are concerned with language in relation to thought and thought in relation to language. That is why skill in both reading and writing is gained through these arts.
But philosophers often find it necessary to coin new words, or to take some word from common speech and make it a technical word. This last procedure is likely to be most misleading to the reader who supposes that he knows what the word means, and therefore treats it as an ordinary word. Most good authors, however, anticipating just this confusion, give very explicit warning whenever they adopt the procedure.
You might just as well be reading a newspaper, for the book cannot enlighten you if you do not try to understand it.
The answer is that you have to discover the meaning of a word you do not understand by using the meanings of all the other words in the context that you do understand.
In general, a phrase is less likely to be ambiguous than a word. Because it is a group of words, each of which is in the context of the others, the single words are more likely to have restricted meanings. That is why a writer is likely to substitute a fairly elaborate phrase for a single word if he wants to be sure that you get his meaning.
You will seek light on what is called “the emotive use of words,” that is, the use of words to arouse emotions, to move men to action or change their minds, as distinct from the communication of knowledge.
But unless we are exclusively interested in the author’s personality, we should not be satisfied with knowing what his opinions are. His propositions are nothing but expressions of personal opinion unless they are supported by reasons.
But every sort of argument consists of a number of statements related in a certain way. This is said because of that. The word “because” here signifies a reason being given.
The presence of arguments is indicated by other words that relate statements, such as: if this is so, then that; or, since this, therefore that; or, it follows from this, that that is the case.
For those of us who are no longer in school, we observed, it is necessary, if we want to go on learning and discovering, to know how to make books teach us well. In that situation, if we want to go on learning, then we must know how to learn from books, which are absent teachers.
Thus, the two processes, outlining and interpretation, meet at the level of propositions and arguments. You work down to propositions and arguments by dividing the book into its parts. You work up to arguments by seeing how they are composed of propositions and ultimately of terms. When you have completed the two processes, you can really say that you know the contents of a book.
You cannot begin to deal with terms, propositions, and arguments—the elements of thought—until you can penetrate beneath the surface of language. So long as words, sentences, and paragraphs are opaque and unanalyzed, they are a barrier to, rather than a medium of, communication. You will read words but not receive knowledge.
RULE 6. MARK THE MOST IMPORTANT SENTENCES IN A BOOK AND DISCOVER THE PROPOSITIONS THEY CONTAIN.
RULE 7. LOCATE OR CONSTRUCT THE BASIC ARGUMENTS IN THE BOOK BY FINDING THEM IN THE CONNECTION OF SENTENCES.
Despite some disappointing experiences, however, we persist in our opinion that the human mind is as naturally sensitive to arguments as the eye is to colors. (There may be some people who are argument-blind!) But the eye will not see if it is not kept open, and the mind will not follow an argument if it is not awake.
interpretation of an important sentence until you have separated out of it all the different, though perhaps related, propositions. Skill in doing this comes with practice. Take some of the complicated sentences in this book and try to state in your own words each of the things that is being asserted. Number them and relate them.
“State in your own words!” That suggests the best test we know for telling whether you have understood the proposition or propositions in the sentence.
But if you cannot get away at all from the author’s words, it shows that only words have passed from him to you, not thought or knowledge.
Unless you can show some acquaintance with actual or possible facts to which the proposition refers or is relevant somehow, you are playing with words, not dealing with thought and knowledge.
The vice of “verbalism” can be defined as the bad habit of using words without regard for the thoughts they should convey and without awareness of the experiences to which they should refer.
Some great writers, such as Montaigne, Locke, or Proust, write extremely long paragraphs; others, such as Machiavelli, Hobbes, or Tolstoy, write relatively short ones. In recent times, under the influence of newspaper and magazine style, most writers tend to cut their paragraphs to fit quick and easy reading.
- The world runs on incentives. Like Spotify making songs shorter to increase the number of streams
Because of all this, we suggest another formulation of RULE 7, as follows: FIND IF YOU CAN THE PARAGRAPHS IN A BOOK THAT STATE ITS IMPORTANT ARGUMENTS; BUT IF THE ARGUMENTS ARE NOT THUS EXPRESSED, YOUR TASK IS TO CONSTRUCT THEM, BY TAKING A SENTENCE FROM THIS PARAGRAPH, AND ONE FROM THAT, UNTIL YOU HAVE GATHERED TOGETHER THE SEQUENCE OF SENTENCES THAT STATE THE PROPOSITIONS THAT COMPOSE THE ARGUMENT.
Some, such as Euclid, Galileo, Newton (authors who write in a geometrical or mathematical style), come close to the ideal of making a single paragraph an argumentative unit. The style of most writing in non-mathematical fields tends to present two or more arguments in a single paragraph or to have an argument run through several.
In The Origin of Species, Darwin summarizes his whole argument for the reader in a last chapter, entitled “Recapitulation and Conclusion.” The reader who has worked through the book deserves that help. The one who has not cannot use it.
In the first place, remember that every argument must involve a number of statements.
If you find the conclusion first, then look for the reasons. If you find the reasons first, see where they lead.
In the second place, discriminate between the kind of argument that points to one or more particular facts as evidence for some generalization and the kind that offers a series of general statements to prove some further generalizations. The former kind of reasoning is usually referred to as inductive, the latter as deductive; but the names are not what is important. What is important is the ability to discriminate between the two.
In the third place, observe what things the author says he must assume, what he says can be proved or otherwise evidenced, and what need not be proved because it is self-evident.
If every proposition had to be proved, there would be no beginning to any proof. Such things as axioms and assumptions or postulates are needed for the proof of other propositions.
- Core truths
Such self-evident propositions, then, have the status of indemonstrable but also undeniable truths. They are based on common experience alone and are part of common-sense knowledge, for they belong to no organized body of knowledge; they do not belong to philosophy or mathematics any more than they belong to science or history. That is why, incidentally, Euclid called them “common notions.”
RULE 8. FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR’S SOLUTIONS ARE.
Reading a book is a kind of conversation. You may think it is not conversation at all, because the author does all the talking and you have nothing to say. If you think that, you do not realize your full obligation as a reader—and you are not grasping your opportunities.
- Learning, no greater responsibility
Ordinary conversations between persons who confront each other are good only when they are carried on civilly.
What is important is that there is an intellectual etiquette to be observed. Without it, conversation is bickering rather than profitable communication.
The profit in good conversation is something learned.
The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging.
- Therefore, what?
Unless they exercise their critical faculties now, they are doing the author an injustice. He has done what he could to make them his equal. He deserves that they act like his peers, that they engage in conversation with him, that they talk back.
Teachability is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgment.
We have everywhere found a certain reciprocity between the art of teaching and the art of being taught, between the skill of the author that makes him a considerate writer and the skill of the reader that makes him handle a book with consideration.
- Learning, no greater responsibility
But in its most general significance, rhetoric is involved in every situation in which communication takes place among human beings.
But you also have the responsibility of taking a position. When you take it, it is yours, not the author’s. To regard anyone except yourself as responsible for your judgment is to be a slave, not a free man. It is from this fact that the liberal arts acquire their name.
Thus you see how the three arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric cooperate in regulating the elaborate processes of writing and reading.
Do not begin to talk back until you have listened carefully and are sure you understand.
RULE 9. YOU MUST BE ABLE TO SAY, WITH REASONABLE CERTAINTY, “I UNDERSTAND,” BEFORE YOU CAN SAY ANY ONE OF THE FOLLOWING THINGS: “I AGREE,” OR “I DISAGREE,” OR “I SUSPEND JUDGMENT.”
To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.
many people make the error already mentioned of identifying criticism with disagreement. (Even “constructive” criticism is disagreement.)
Every lecturer has also had the experience of having critical questions asked that were not based on any understanding of what he had said.
There is actually no point in answering critics of this sort. The only polite thing to do is to ask them to state your position for you, the position they claim to be challenging. If they cannot do it satisfactorily, if they cannot repeat what you have said in their own words, you know that they do not understand, and you are entirely justified in ignoring their criticisms.
- Connect to Charles Darwin
When you find the rare person who shows that he understands what you are saying as well as you do, then you can delight in his agreement or be seriously disturbed by his dissent.
When you say “I don’t understand,” watch your tone of voice. Be sure it concedes the possibility that it may not be the author’s fault.
And sometimes a book is related to other books by the same author, and depends upon them for its full significance. In this situation, also, you should be more circumspect about saying “I understand,” and slower to raise your critical lance.
The same is true of other writers, such as Plato and Kant, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, who have not been able to say everything they knew or thought in a single work. Those who judge Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason without reading his Critique of Practical Reason, or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations without reading his Theory of the Moral Sentiments, or The Communist Manifesto without Marx’s Capital, are more likely than not to be agreeing or disagreeing with something they do not fully understand.
RULE 10, and it can be expressed thus: WHEN YOU DISAGREE, DO SO REASONABLY, AND NOT DISPUTATIOUSLY OR CONTENTIOUSLY.
Most people think that winning the argument is what matters, not learning the truth. He who regards conversation as a battle can win only by being an antagonist, only by disagreeing successfully, whether he is right or wrong.
But if he realizes that the only profit in conversation, with living or dead teachers, is what one can learn from them, if he realizes that you win only by gaining knowledge, not by knocking the other fellow down, he may see the futility of mere contentiousness.
We are not saying that a reader should not ultimately disagree and try to show where the author is wrong. We are saying only that he should be as prepared to agree as to disagree.
Even when they do not agree, they can. The point we are trying to make is that disagreement is futile agitation unless it is undertaken with the hope that it may lead to the resolution of an issue.
The relatively ignorant often wrongly disagree with the relatively learned about matters exceeding their knowledge. The more learned, however, have a right to be critical of errors made by those who lack relevant knowledge. Disagreement of this sort can also be corrected. Inequality of knowledge is always curable by instruction.
- Connect to the death of expertise
In any event, what we have just said applies to the great majority of disagreements. They can be resolved by the removal of misunderstanding or of ignorance.
- Misunderstanding and ignorance are the real villains to fight against. #[[The Notetaking Wars Are Real]]
Hence the person who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another. He should always keep before him the possibility that he misunderstands or that he is ignorant on some point. No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught.
- When the facts change I change my mind
The trouble is that many people regard disagreement as unrelated to either teaching or being taught. They think that everything is just a matter of opinion. I have mine, and you have yours; and our right to our opinions is as inviolable as our right to private property.
- Death of expertise
If genuine knowledge, not mere personal opinion, is at stake, then, for the most part, either disagreements are apparent only—to be removed by coming to terms and a meeting of minds; or they are real, and the genuine issues can be resolved—in the long run, of course—by appeals to fact and reason.
The reader who does not distinguish between the reasoned statement of knowledge and the flat expression of opinion is not reading to learn.
RULE 11, therefore, can be stated as follows: RESPECT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KNOWLEDGE AND MERE PERSONAL OPINION BY GIVING REASONS FOR ANY CRITICAL JUDGMENT YOU MAKE.
Self-evident propositions, in the sense in which we defined them in the previous chapter, seem to us to be both indemonstrable and undeniable truths. Most knowledge, however, lacks that degree of absoluteness. What we know, we know subject to correction; we know it because all, or at least the weight, of the evidence supports it, but we are not and cannot be certain that new evidence will not sometime invalidate what we now believe is true.
- Line upon line, precept on precept
Knowledge, if you please, consists in those opinions that can be defended, opinions for which there is evidence of one kind or another. If we really know something, in this sense, we must believe that we can convince others of what we know.
- #[[Mormon Apologetics]]
We can do no more than opine that something is true when we have no evidence or reason for the statement other than our personal feeling or prejudice. We can say that it is true and that we know it when we have objective evidence that other reasonable men are likely to accept.
- #[[Why I Believe]]
The first is this. Since men are animals as well as rational, it is necessary to acknowledge the emotions you bring to a dispute, or those that arise in the course of it. Otherwise you are likely to be giving vent to feelings, not stating reasons. You may even think you have reasons, when all you have are strong feelings.
Second, you must make your own assumptions explicit. You must know what your prejudices—that is, your prejudgments—are. Otherwise you are not likely to admit that your opponent may be equally entitled to different assumptions. Good controversy should not be a quarrel about assumptions.
- I want to see the block references in your thinking
Third and finally, an attempt at impartiality is a good antidote for the blindness that is almost inevitable in partisanship. Controversy without partisanship is, of course, impossible. But to be sure that there is more light in it, and less heat, each of the disputants should at least try to take the other fellow’s point of view.
The four points can be briefly summarized by conceiving the reader as conversing with the author, as talking back. After he has said, “I understand but I disagree,” he can make the following remarks to the author: (1) “You are uninformed”; (2) “You are misinformed”; (3) “You are illogical—your reasoning is not cogent”; (4) “Your analysis is incomplete.”
To say that an author is uninformed is to say that he lacks some piece of knowledge that is relevant to the problem he is trying to solve.
To support the remark, you must be able yourself to state the knowledge that the author lacks and show how it is relevant, how it makes a difference to his conclusions.
Lack of relevant knowledge makes it impossible to solve certain problems or support certain conclusions. Erroneous suppositions, however, lead to wrong conclusions and untenable solutions.
Dewey’s How We Think is an incomplete analysis of thinking because it fails to treat the sort of thinking that occurs in reading or learning by instruction in addition to the sort that occurs in investigation and discovery.
The question, Is it true? can be asked of anything we read. It is applicable to every kind of writing, in one or another sense of “truth”—mathematical, scientific, philosophical, historical, and poetical.
Many readers, and most particularly those who review current publications, employ other standards for judging, and praising or condemning, the books they read—their novelty, their sensationalism, their seductiveness, their force, and even their power to bemuse or befuddle the mind, but not their truth, their clarity, or their power to enlighten.
- Never read a book that is less than a year old
And if you are reading for enlightenment, there is really no end to the inquiry that, at every stage of learning, is renewed by the question, What of it?
- Therefore, what?
If error and ignorance did not circumscribe truth and knowledge, we should not have to be critical.
When we speak of someone as “well-read,” we should have this ideal in mind. Too often, we use that phrase to mean the quantity rather than the quality of reading. A person who has read widely but not well deserves to be pitied rather than praised. As Thomas Hobbes said, “If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.”
The great writers have always been great readers, but that does not mean that they read all the books that, in their day, were listed as the indispensable ones. In many cases, they read fewer books than are now required in most of our colleges, but what they did read, they read well.
In the natural course of events, a good student frequently becomes a teacher, and so, too, a good reader becomes an author.
Reading a book with a dictionary in the other hand is a bad idea, although this does not mean you should never go to a dictionary for the meanings of words that are strange to you. And seeking the meaning of a book that puzzles you in a commentary is often ill-advised. On the whole, it is best to do all that you can by yourself before seeking outside help; for if you act consistently on this principle, you will find that you need less and less outside help.
- Study it in your mind and then ask me if it’s right
The enthusiasm with which people embark on a course of reading great books often gives way, fairly soon, to a feeling of hopeless inadequacy.
There is another reason: namely, that they think they should be able to understand the first book they pick up, without having read the others to which it is closely related. They may try to read The Federalist Papers without having first read the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
Not only are many of the great books related, but also they were written in a certain order that should not be ignored. A later writer has been influenced by an earlier one. If you read the earlier writer first, he may help you to understand the later one.
It has often been observed that the great books are involved in a prolonged conversation. The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read. As readers, they carried on a conversation with other authors, just as each of us carries on a conversation with the books we read, though we may not write other books.
To use a reference book well, you must, first, have some idea, however vague it may be, of what you want to know. Your ignorance must be like a circle of darkness surrounded by light. You want to bring light to the dark circle. You cannot do that unless light surrounds the darkness. Another way to say this is that you must be able to ask a reference book an intelligible question. It will be no help to you if you are wandering, lost, in a fog of ignorance.
organized. It will do you no good to know what you want to know, and to know the kind of reference book to use, if you do not know how to use the particular work. Thus there is an art of reading reference books, just as there is an art to reading anything else.
- Just like strategic googling
Thus we see that from the beginning the educational motive dominated the making of dictionaries, although there was also an interest in preserving the purity and order of the language.
- “I’ve written books about ‘little did he know.’” -> “thus we see”
If you look upon a dictionary merely as a spelling book or guide to pronunciation, you will use it accordingly, which is to say not well. If you realize that it contains a wealth of historical information, crystallized in the growth and development of language, you will pay attention, not merely to the variety of meanings listed under each word, but also to their order and relation.
There is no more irritating fellow than the one who tries to settle an argument about communism, or justice, or freedom, by quoting from the dictionary.
The man who knew an encyclopedia by heart would be in grave danger of incurring the title idiot savant—“learned fool.”
Though the word “encyclopedia” is Greek, the Greeks had no encyclopedia, and for the same reason that they had no dictionary. The word meant to them not a book about knowledge, a book in which knowledge reposed, but knowledge itself—all the knowledge that an educated man should have.
But is the world, which is the subject matter of an encyclopedia, arranged alphabetically? Obviously not. Well then, how is the world arranged and ordered? This comes down to asking how knowledge is ordered.
- Relational ideas vs. hierarchical ideas
All knowledge was once ordered in relation to the seven liberal arts—grammar, rhetoric, and logic, the trivium; arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, the quadrivium.
Ideally, the best encyclopedia would be one that had both a topical and an alphabetical arrangement. Its presentation of material in the form of separate articles would be alphabetical, but it would also contain some kind of topical key or outline—essentially, a table of contents. (A table of contents is a topical arrangement of a book, as opposed to an index, which is an alphabetical arrangement.) As far as we know, there is no such encyclopedia on the market today, but it would be worth the effort to try to make one.
- Relational ideas vs. hierarchical ideas
Facts change, we say. We mean that some propositions that are considered to be facts in one epoch are no longer considered to be facts in another. Insofar as facts are “true” and represent reality, they cannot change, of course, because truth, strictly speaking, does not change, nor does reality.
An encyclopedia, properly speaking, contains no arguments, except insofar as it reports the course of arguments that are now widely accepted as correct or at least as of historical interest.
In any art or field of practice, rules have a disappointing way of being too general. The more general, of course, the fewer, and that is an advantage. The more general, too, the more intelligible—it is easier to understand the rules in and by themselves. But it is also true that the more general the rules, the more remote they are from the intricacies of the actual situation in which you try to follow them.
- Connect the da Vinci book about knowing the rules so you can break them
A theoretical book can solve its own problems. But a practical problem can only be solved by action itself.
Since the ultimate problems to be solved are practical—problems of action, in fields where men can do better or worse—an intelligent reader of such books about “practical principles” always reads between the lines or in the margins.
In judging a practical book, everything turns on the ends or goals.
We have no practical interest in even the soundest means to reach ends we disapprove of or do not care about.
You need know nothing whatever about the author of a mathematical treatise; his reasoning is either good or not, and it makes no difference what kind of man he is. But in order to understand and judge a moral treatise, a political tract, or an economic discussion, you should know something about the character of the writer, something about his life and times.
Agreement with a practical book, however, does imply action on your part. If you are convinced or persuaded by the author that the ends he proposes are worthy, and if you are further convinced or persuaded that the means he recommends are likely to achieve those ends, then it is hard to see how you can refuse to act in the way the author wishes you to. We recognize, of course, that this does not always happen. But we want you to realize what it means when it does not. It means that despite his apparent agreement with the author’s ends and acceptance of his means, the reader really does not agree or accept. If he did both, he could not reasonably fail to act.
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?
Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.
Expository books try to convey knowledge—knowledge about experiences that the reader has had or could have. Imaginative ones try to communicate an experience itself—one that the reader can have or share only by reading—and if they succeed, they give the reader something to be enjoyed.
We must act in such a way, when reading a story, that we let it act on us. We must allow it to move us, we must let it do whatever work it wants to do on us. We must somehow make ourselves open to it.
The logic of expository writing aims at an ideal of unambiguous explicitness. Nothing should be left between the lines. Everything that is relevant and statable should be said as explicitly and clearly as possible. In contrast, imaginative writing relies as much upon what is implied as upon what is said.
We learn from experience—the experience that we have in the course of our daily lives. So, too, we can learn from the vicarious, or artistically created, experiences that fiction produces in our imagination.
The good reader of a story does not question the world that the author creates—the world that is re-created in himself. “We must grant the artist his subject, his idea, his donné,” said Henry James in The Art of Fiction; “our criticism is applied only to what he makes of it.”
- “Yes, and…”
You will say not only that you like or dislike the book, but also why. The reasons you give will, of course, have some critical relevance to the book itself, but in their first expression they are more likely to be about you—your preferences and prejudices—than about the book.
George Orwell’s Animal Farm and his 1984 are both powerful attacks on totalitarianism. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is an eloquent diatribe against the tyranny of technological progress. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle tells us more about the petty cruelty and inhumanity of the Soviet bureaucracy than a hundred factual studies and reports.
As E. B. White once remarked, “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom—he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”
One reason why fiction is a human necessity is that it satisfies many unconscious as well as conscious needs. It would be important if it only touched the conscious mind, as expository writing does. But fiction is important, too, because it also touches the unconscious.
Perhaps the most honored but probably the least read books in the great tradition of the Western World are the major epic poems, particularly the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.
We put much faith in commentaries, criticism, biographies—but this may be only because we doubt our own ability to read.
We think, although not all historians agree with us, that the essence of history is narration, that the last five letters of the word—“story”—help us to understand the basic meaning.
A historical fact, though we may have a feeling of trust and solidity about the word, is one of the most elusive things in the world.
A good historian does not, of course, make up the past. He considers himself responsibly bound by some concept or criterion of accuracy or facts. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the historian must always make up something. He must either find a general pattern in, or impose one on, events; or he must suppose that he knows why the persons in his story did the things they did.
Tolstoy had such a theory about history. He was not a historian, of course; he was a novelist. But many historians have held the same view, particularly in modern times. The causes of every human action, Tolstoy thought, were so manifold, so complex, and so deeply hidden in unconscious motivations that it is impossible to know why anything ever happened.
Because theories of history differ, and because a historian’s theory affects his account of events, it is necessary to read more than one account of the history of an event or period if we want to understand it. Indeed, this is the first rule of reading history.
- Triangulation
It is probably of practical significance to all Americans that they know something about the history of the Civil War. We still live in the backwash of that great and sorry conflict; we live in a world it helped to make.
- Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it
every narrative history has to be written from some point of view.
Thucydides. You may be aware that he wrote the only major contemporary history of the Peloponnesian War
Indeed, if we stop to think of it, almost all that remains of the Peloponnesian War is Thucydides’ account of it.
Yet that account is still important. For Thucydides’ story—we might as well use that word—has had an influence on the subsequent history of man. Leaders in later eras read Thucydides.
They used Thucydides as an excuse and a justification, and even as a pattern of conduct. The result was that by ever so little, perhaps, but perceptibly, the history of the world was changed by the view held of a small portion of it by Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. Thus we read Thucydides not because he described perfectly what happened before he wrote his book, but because he to a certain extent determined what happened after. And we read him, strange as this may seem, to know what is happening now.
- Reading what others have read - live the library of your librarians
An author cannot be blamed for not doing what he did not try to do.
If we discover that, if we can say which aspect of the story he is telling seems to him most fundamental, we can understand him better. We may not agree with his judgment about what is basic, but we can still learn from him.
A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.
Satires and pictures of philosophical utopias have little effect; we would all like the world to be better, but we are seldom inspired by the recommendations of authors who do no more than describe, often bitterly, the difference between the real and the ideal. History, which tells us of the actions of men of the past, often does lead us to make changes, to try to better our lot.
History suggests the possible, for it describes things that have already been done. If they have been done, perhaps they can be done again—or perhaps they can be avoided.
With the world as small and dangerous as it has become, it would be a good idea for all of us to start reading history better.
One of the greatest of all biographies is Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and it is continuously fascinating.
The world would be the poorer without Izaak Walton’s Lives of his friends, the poets John Donne and George Herbert, for example (Walton is of course better known for his The Compleat Angler); or John Tyndall’s account of his friend Michael Faraday in Faraday the Discoverer.
Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans is such a work. Plutarch told the stories of great men of the Greek and Roman past in order to help his contemporaries to be great also, and to help them avoid the errors into which the great so often fall—or so he felt.
Plutarch realized this himself. His original intention in writing had been to instruct others, he said, but in the course of the work he discovered that more and more it was he himself who was deriving profit and stimulation from “lodging these men one after the other in his house.”
For example, just as Plutarch shows Alexander the Great modeling his own life on that of Achilles (whose life he learned about from Homer), so many later conquerors have tried to model their lives on that of Plutarch’s Alexander.
If it is difficult to know the life of anyone else, it is even more difficult to know one’s own.
Everybody has some secrets he cannot bear to divulge; everybody also has some illusions about himself, which it is almost impossible for him to regard as illusions.
But we should remember that words do not write themselves—the ones we read have been found and written down by a living man.
You should remember, of course, that if you wish to know the truth about a person’s life, you should read as many biographies of him as you can find, including his own account of his life, if he wrote one.
- Triangulation
Nevertheless, although the rules of reading do not all always have to be applied, the four questions must always be asked of anything you read. That means, of course, that they must be asked when you are faced with the kind of things to which most of us devote much of our reading time: newspapers, magazines, books about current events, and the like.
If we could be everywhere at once, overhear all conversations on earth, look into the heart of every living person, we might be able to make a stab at the truth of current events.
Having asked what the book is trying to prove, you should next ask whom the author is trying to convince.
In The Seventeenth Century Background, Basil Willey has this to say: … it is almost insuperably difficult to become critically conscious of one’s own habitual assumptions; “doctrines felt as facts” can only be seen to be doctrines, and not facts, after great efforts of thought, and usually only with the aid of a first-rate metaphysician.
- Connect to Charles Darwin. Understand what you believe to be facts and how that is viewed by those who disagree with you
Next, you must ask if there is a special language that the author uses. This is particularly important in reading magazines and newspapers, but it also applies to all books about current history. Certain words provoke special responses from us, responses that they might not provoke from other readers a century hence.
- Connect to Conor’s curse of knowledge
We have heard a good deal lately about the “management of the news”; it is important to realize that this applies not only to us, as members of the public, but also to reporters who are supposed to be “in the know.” They may not be. With the best good will in the world, with every intention of providing us with the truth of the matter, a reporter may still be “uninformed” with regard to secret actions, treaties, and so forth.
- Journalism
The warning is this: Caveat lector—“Let the reader beware.” Readers do not have to be wary when reading Aristotle, or Dante, or Shakespeare. But the author of any contemporary book may have—though he does not necessarily have—an interest in your understanding it in a certain way. Or if he does not, the sources of his information may have such an interest. You should know that interest, and take it into account in whatever you read.
- Connect to “never read a book less than a year old”
Of course, the very best articles, like the best books, cannot be condensed without loss.
We may not have to worry about this very much if 1,000 pages are cut down to 900, say; but if 1,000 pages are cut to ten, or even one, then the question of what has been left out becomes critical. Hence the greater the condensation, the more important it is that we know something of the character of the condenser;
- Connect to Mormon talking about including a hundredth of what he could have
Until approximately the end of the nineteenth century, the major scientific books were written for a lay audience. Their authors—men like Galileo, and Newton, and Darwin—were not averse to being read by specialists in their fields; indeed, they wanted to reach such readers. But there was as yet no institutionalized specialization in those days, days which Albert Einstein called “the happy childhood of science.” Intelligent and well-read persons were expected to read scientific books as well as history and philosophy; there were no hard and fast distinctions, no boundaries that could not be crossed.
Most modern scientists do not care what lay readers think, and so they do not even try to reach them.
Today, science tends to be written by experts for experts. A serious communication on a scientific subject assumes so much specialized knowledge on the part of the reader that it usually cannot be read at all by anyone not learned in the field.
- Curse of expertise
There are obvious advantages to this approach, not least that it serves to advance science more quickly. Experts talking to each other about their expertise can arrive very quickly at the frontiers of it—they can see the problems at once and begin to try to solve them. But the cost is equally obvious. You—the ordinary intelligent reader whom we are addressing in this book—are left quite out of the picture.
Nowadays, philosophers seldom write for anyone except other philosophers; economists write for economists; and even historians are beginning to find that the kind of shorthand, monographic communication to other experts that has long been dominant in science is a more convenient way of getting ideas across than the more traditional narrative work written for everyone.
The attitude of scientists to historians of science could be summed up in that famous remark of George Bernard Shaw’s: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.”
None of them is impossibly difficult, not even a book like Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, if you are willing to make the effort.
The more “objective” a scientific author is, the more he will explicitly ask you to take this or that for granted. Scientific objectivity is not the absence of initial bias. It is attained by frank confession of it.
And, as ideas are preserved and communicated by means of words, it necessarily follows that we cannot improve the language of any science without at the same time improving the science itself; neither can we, on the other hand, improve a science without improving the language or nomenclature which belongs to it.
- Joseph smith - “god works by words”
But two different persons can comprehend a third thing that is outside of and emotionally separated from both of them, such as an electrical circuit, an isosceles triangle, or a syllogism. It is mainly when we invest these things with emotional connotations that we have trouble understanding them. Mathematics allows us to avoid this. There are no emotional connotations of mathematical terms, propositions, and equations when these are properly used.
- Language elicits emotion which shapes our understanding. Two people can’t look at the same equation and get a different answer; why can’t language be more like that?
Is it an exaggeration to say that this is beautiful? We do not think so. What we have here is a really logical exposition of a really limited problem. There is something very attractive about both the clarity of the exposition and the limited nature of the problem. Ordinary discourse, even very good philosophical discourse, finds it difficult to limit its problems in this way. And the use of logic in the case of philosophical problems is hardly ever as clear as this.
The end of Book III is famous, for it contains some statements by Newton about the scientific enterprise itself that are well worth reading.
They can be read without too much difficulty if you always keep in mind that your primary obligation is not to become competent in the subject matter but instead to understand the problem.
Popular Science
This is because, although they are about science, they generally skirt or avoid the two main problems that confront the reader of an original contribution in science. First, they contain relatively few descriptions of experiments (instead, they merely report the results of experiments). Second, they contain relatively little mathematics (unless they are popular books about mathematics itself ).
- Criticisms of [[Malcolm Gladwell]]
In reading them, we are at the mercy of reporters who filter the information for us. If they are good reporters, we are fortunate. If they are not, we have almost no recourse.
- Journalism
In the case of such excellent popular books as Whitehead’s Introduction to Mathematics, Lincoln Barnett’s The Universe and Dr. Einstein, and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle, something more is required.
Mathematics is one of the major modern mysteries. Perhaps it is the leading one, occupying a place in our society similar to the religious mysteries of another age.
Philosophy, according to Aristotle, begins in wonder. It certainly begins in childhood, even if for most of us it stops there, too.
What happens between the nursery and college to turn the flow of questions off, or, rather, to turn it into the duller channels of adult curiosity about matters of fact? A mind not agitated by good questions cannot appreciate the significance of even the best answers. It is easy enough to learn the answers. But to develop actively inquisitive minds, alive with real questions, profound questions—that is another story. Why should we have to try to develop such minds, when children are born with them? Somewhere along the line, adults must fail somehow to sustain the infant’s curiosity at its original depth. School itself, perhaps, dulls the mind—by the dead weight of rote learning, much of which may be necessary. The failure is probably even more the parents’ fault. We so often tell a child there is no answer, even when one is available, or demand that he ask no more questions. We thinly conceal our irritation when baffled by the apparently unanswerable query. All this discourages the child. He may get the impression that it is impolite to be too inquisitive. Human inquisitiveness is never killed; but it is soon debased to the sort of questions asked by most college students, who, like the adults they are soon to become, ask only for information.
The ability to retain the child’s view of the world, with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare—and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.
Such questions are asked by the philosopher who turns his attention from being to becoming and also tries to relate becoming to being.
Is there a universally valid distinction between good and evil? Are there certain things that are always good, others that are always bad, whatever the circumstances? Or was Hamlet right when, echoing Montaigne, he said: “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
Books that tell you how to make something, such as a cookbook, or how to do something, such as a driver’s manual, need not try to argue that you ought to become a good cook, or learn to drive a car well; they can assume that you want to make or do something and merely tell you how to succeed in your efforts. In contrast, books of normative philosophy concern themselves primarily with the goals all men ought to seek—goals such as leading a good life or instituting a good society—and, unlike cookbooks and driving manuals, they go no further than prescribing in the most universal terms the means that ought to be employed in order to achieve these goals.
let us call questions about what is and happens in the world, or about what men ought to do or seek, “first-order questions.” We should recognize, then, that there are also “second-order questions” that can be asked: questions about our first-order knowledge, questions about the content of our thinking when we try to answer first-order questions, questions about the ways in which we express such thoughts in language.
The majority of professional philosophers at the present day no longer believe that first-order questions can be answered by philosophers. Most professional philosophers today devote their attention exclusively to second-order questions, very often to questions having to do with the language in which thought is expressed.
In fact, philosophy today, like contemporary science or mathematics, is no longer being written for lay readers.
What distinguishes them is that they thought about it extremely well: they formulated the most penetrating questions that could be asked about it, and they undertook to develop carefully and clearly worked-out answers. By what means? Not by investigation. Not by having or trying to get more experience than the rest of us have. Rather, by thinking more profoundly about the experience than the rest of us have.
there is no other way than thinking to answer such questions. If we could build a telescope or microscope to examine the properties of existence, we should do so, of course. But no such instruments are possible.
Although there is only one philosophical method, there are at least five styles of exposition that have been employed by the great philosophers of the Western tradition.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL DIALOGUE:
The style is conversational, even colloquial; a number of men discuss a subject with Socrates (or, in the later dialogues, with a speaker known as The Athenian Stranger); often, after a certain amount of fumbling, Socrates embarks on a series of questions and comments that help to elucidate the subject.
Yet it may be a sign of the inappropriateness of this style of philosophizing that no one except Plato has ever been able to handle it effectively.
the later Greeks themselves had a saying: “Everywhere I go in my head, I meet Plato coming back.”
THE PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE OR ESSAY:
Immanuel Kant, although he was probably more influenced by Plato in a philosophical sense, adopted Aristotle’s style of exposition. His treatises are finished works of art, unlike Aristotle’s in this respect. They state the main problem first, go through the subject matter in a thorough and business-like way, and treat special problems by the way or at the last.
THE MEETING OF OBJECTIONS:
Aquinas’ style is a combination of question-raising and objection-meeting. The Summa is divided into parts, treatises, questions, and articles. The form of all the articles is the same. A question is posed; the opposite (wrong) answer to it is given; arguments are educed in support of that wrong answer; these are countered first by an authoritative text (often a quotation from Scripture); and finally, Aquinas introduces his own answer or solution with the words “I answer that.” Having given his own view of the matter, he then replies to each of the arguments for the wrong answer.
A proposition was not accepted as true unless it could meet the test of open discussion; the philosopher was not a solitary thinker, but instead faced his opponents in the intellectual market place (as Socrates might have said). Thus, the Summa Theologica is imbued with the spirit of debate and discussion.
THE SYSTEMIZATION OF PHILOSOPHY:
A sign of this is that when reading Spinoza you can skip a great deal, in exactly the same way that you can skip in Newton. You cannot skip anything in Kant or Aristotle, because the line of reasoning is continuous; and you cannot skip anything in Plato, any more than you would skip a part of a play or poem.
Nevertheless, it is questionable whether it is possible to write a satisfactory philosophical work in mathematical form, as Spinoza tried to do, or a satisfactory scientific work in dialogue form, as Galileo tried to do. The fact is that both of these men failed to some extent to communicate what they wished to communicate, and it seems likely that the form they chose was a major reason for the failure.
THE APHORISTIC STYLE:
The great advantage of the aphoristic form in philosophy is that it is heuristic; the reader has the impression that more is being said than is actually said, for he does much of the work of thinking—of making connections between statements and of constructing arguments for positions—himself.
This is the insight that happiness is the whole of the good, not the highest good, for in that case it would be only one good among others. Recognizing this, we see that happiness does not consist in self-perfection, or the goods of self-improvement, even though these constitute the highest among partial goods. Happiness, as Aristotle says, is the quality of a whole life, and he means “whole” not only in a temporal sense but also in terms of all the aspects from which a life can be viewed. The happy man is one, as we might say nowadays, who puts it all together—and keeps it there throughout his life.
Consistency, Emerson said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.” That is a very carefree statement, but although it is probably wise to remember it, there is no doubt, either, that inconsistency in a philosopher is a serious problem.
The basic terms of philosophical discussions are, of course, abstract. But so are those of science. No general knowledge is expressible except in abstract terms. There is nothing particularly difficult about abstractions. We use them every day of our lives and in every sort of conversation.
Just as inductive arguments should be the reader’s main focus in the case of scientific books, so here, in the case of philosophy, you must pay closest attention to the philosopher’s principles. They may be either things he asks you to assume with him, or matters that he calls self-evident. There is no trouble about assumptions. Make them to see what follows, even if you yourself have contrary presuppositions.
It is a good mental exercise to pretend that you believe something you really do not believe. And the clearer you are about your own prejudgments, the more likely you will be not to misjudge those made by others.
- Connect to Charles Darwin
A philosopher, faced with a problem, can do nothing but think about it. A reader, faced with a philosophical book, can do nothing but read it—which means, as we know, thinking about it. There are no other aids except the mind itself.
The fact that philosophers disagree should not trouble you, for two reasons. First, the fact of disagreement, if it is persistent, may point to a great unsolved and, perhaps, insoluble problem. It is good to know where the true mysteries are. Second, the disagreements of others are relatively unimportant. Your responsibility is only to make up your own mind.
But you must always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.
The Word of God is obviously the most difficult writing men can read; but it is also, if you believe it is the Word of God, the most important to read.
There is also a large and important category of contemporary writing that might be termed social-science fiction. Here the aim is to create artificial models of society that allow us, for example, to explore the social consequences of technological innovation.
- Historical futurism
You cannot understand a book if you refuse to hear what it is saying.
Until quite recently, at least, stipulation of usage was not as common in the social sciences as it is in the hard sciences. One reason for this is that the social sciences were typically not mathematicized. Another is that stipulation of usage in the social or behavioral sciences is harder to do. It is one thing to define a circle or an isosceles triangle; it is quite another to define an economic depression or mental health. Even if a social scientist attempts to define such terms, his readers are inclined to question his usage. As a result, the social scientist must continue to struggle with his own terms throughout his work—and his struggle creates problems for his reader.
Or our interest may concern race relations, or education, or taxation, or the problems of local government. Typically, there is no single, authoritative work on any of these subjects, and we must therefore read several.
Fully to understand a philosopher, you should make some attempt to read the philosophers your author himself has read, the philosophers who have influenced him.
- Live the librarians library
Is the love that a man and woman have for each other the same when they are courting as when they are married, the same when they are in their twenties as when they are in their seventies?
Although this level of reading is defined as the reading of two or more books on the same subject, which implies that the identification of the subject matter occurs before the reading begins, it is in a sense true that the identification of the subject matter must follow the reading, not precede it.
- Portfolio ideas come from exploring not just picking them
The first thing to do when you have amassed your bibliography is to inspect all of the books on your list. You should not read any of them analytically before inspecting all of them. Inspectional reading will not acquaint you with all of the intricacies of the subject matter, or with all of the insights that your authors can provide, but it will perform two essential functions. First, it will give you a clear enough idea of your subject so that your subsequent analytical reading of some of the books on the list is productive. And second, it will allow you to cut down your bibliography to a more manageable size.
They spend the same amount of time and effort on every book or article they read. As a result, they do not read those books that deserve a really good reading as well as they deserve, and they waste time on works that deserve less attention.
STEP 1 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: FINDING THE RELEVANT PASSAGES.
In syntopical reading, it is you and your concerns that are primarily to be served, not the books that you read.
STEP 2 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: BRINGING THE AUTHORS TO TERMS.
now you are faced with a number of different authors, and it is unlikely that they will have all used the same words, or even the same terms. Thus it is you who must establish the terms, and bring your authors to them rather than the other way around.
Not only must we resolutely refuse to accept the terminology of any one author; we must also be willing to face the possibility that no author’s terminology will be useful to us.
STEP 3 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: GETTING THE QUESTIONS CLEAR.
Sometimes, indeed, we have to accept the fact that an author gives no answer to one or more of our questions. In that case, we must record him as silent or indeterminate on the question. But even if he does not discuss the question explicitly, we can sometimes find an implicit answer in his book. If he had considered the question, we may conclude, he would then have answered it in such and such a way. Restraint is necessary here; we cannot put thoughts into our authors’ minds, or words into their mouths. But we also cannot depend entirely on their explicit statements about the problem.
- Triangulation
STEP 4 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: DEFINING THE ISSUES.
An issue is truly joined when two authors who understand a question in the same way answer it in contrary or contradictory ways. But this does not happen as often as one might wish. Usually, differences in answers must be ascribed to different conceptions of the question as often as to different views of the subject.
STEP 5 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: ANALYZING THE DISCUSSION.
we have to do more than merely ask and answer the questions. We have to ask them in a certain order, and be able to defend that order; we must show how the questions are answered differently and try to say why; and we must be able to point to the texts in the books examined that support our classification of answers.
- He is wise who knows where something is written
We have already observed that including novels, plays, and poems in a syntopical reading project is difficult, and this is so for several reasons. First of all, the backbone or essence of a story is its plot, not its positions on issues. Second, even the most talkative characters seldom take clear positions on an issue—they tend to talk, in the story, about other matters, mainly emotional relations. Third, even if a character does make such a speech—as, for example, Settembrini does about progress in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain—we can never be sure that it is the author’s view that is being represented. Is the author being ironic in allowing his character to go on about the subject? Is he intending you to see the foolishness of the position, rather than its wisdom? Generally speaking, an intensive effort of synthetic interpretation is required before a fictional work can be placed on one side or another of an issue. The effort is so great, and the results essentially so dubious, that usually it is prudent to abstain.
- Interesting to me because I feel differently. I take so much from the analogy of fiction (e.g. West Wing)
These issues have to do with the nature or properties of the progress that they all, being progress authors, assert is a fact of history. There are only three issues here, although the discussion of each of them is complex. They can be stated as questions: (1) Is progress necessary, or is it contingent on other occurrences? (2) Will progress continue indefinitely, or will it eventually come to an end or “plateau out”? (3) Is there progress in human nature as well as in human institutions—in the human animal itself, or merely in the external conditions of human life?
The six are: (1) progress in knowledge, (2) technological progress, (3) economic progress, (4) political progress, (5) moral progress, and (6) progress in the fine arts.
Unless you know what books to read, you cannot read syntopically, but unless you can read syntopically, you do not know what to read.
The Syntopicon is an example of such a work. Produced in the 1940s, it is a topical index to the set of books titled Great Books of the Western World. Under each of some 3,000 topics or subjects, it lists references to pages within the set where that subject is discussed.
the collection of a number of passages on the same topic, but from different works and different authors, serves to sharpen the reader’s interpretation of each passage read. Sometimes, when passages from the same book are read in sequence and in the context of one another, each becomes clearer.
- Ideas having sex with each other
if Aristotle, for example, walked into our office, attired no doubt in robes and accompanied by an interpreter who knew both modern English and classical Greek, we would not be able to understand him or he us. We simply do not believe it.
If that is possible (and we do not really think anyone would deny it), then it is not impossible for one book to “talk” to another through the medium of an interpreter—namely, you, the syntopical reader.
SURVEYING THE FIELD PREPARATORY TO SYNTOPICAL READING 1. Create a tentative bibliography of your subject by recourse to library catalogues, advisors, and bibliographies in books. 2. Inspect all of the books on the tentative bibliography to ascertain which are germane to your subject, and also to acquire a clearer idea of the subject. Note: These two steps are not, strictly speaking, chronologically distinct; that is, the two steps have an effect on each other, with the second, in particular, serving to modify the first. II. SYNTOPICAL READING OF THE BIBLIOGRAPHY AMASSED IN STAGE I 1. Inspect the books already identified as relevant to your subject in Stage I in order to find the most relevant passages. 2. Bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that all, or the great majority, of the authors can be interpreted as employing, whether they actually employ the words or not. 3. Establish a set of neutral propositions for all of the authors by framing a set of questions to which all or most of the authors can be interpreted as giving answers, whether they actually treat the questions explicitly or not. 4. Define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. You should remember that an issue does not always exist explicitly between or among authors, but that it sometimes has to be constructed by interpretation of the authors’ views on matters that may not have been their primary concern. 5. Analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject. More general issues should precede less general ones, and relations among issues should be clearly indicated. Note: Dialectical detachment or objectivity should, ideally, be maintained throughout. One way to insure this is always to accompany an interpretation of an author’s views on an issue with an actual quotation from his text.
The results of these researches were published as The Idea of Progress, New York: Praeger, 1967. The work was done under the auspices of the Institute for Philosophical Research, of which the authors are respectively Director and Associate Director.
you. If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article.
Reading for information does not stretch your mind any more than reading for amusement. It may seem as though it does, but that is merely because your mind is fuller of facts than it was before you read the book. However, your mind is essentially in the same condition that it was before. There has been a quantitative change, but no improvement in your skill.
- I don’t think I agree. I suppose it’s less about the material and more about your approach. But I think reading fiction can stretch my mind.
The books that you will want to practice your reading on, particularly your analytical reading, must also make demands on you.
A good book does reward you for trying to read it. The best books reward you most of all. The reward, of course, is of two kinds. First, there is the improvement in your reading skill that occurs when you successfully tackle a good, difficult work. Second—and this in the long run is much more important—a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself.
The great majority of the several million books that have been written in the Western tradition alone—more than 99 per cent of them—will not make sufficient demands on you for you to improve your skill in reading.
How can a book grow as you grow? It is impossible, of course; a book, once it is written and published, does not change. But what you only now begin to realize is that the book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you, and probably always will remain so. Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels.
- What if a book could change and adapt and you can grow together? #[[Open Source Knowledge]]
There are obviously not many books that can do this for any of us. Our estimate was that the number is considerably less than a hundred. But the number is even less than that for any given reader. Human beings differ in many ways other than in the power of their minds. They have different tastes; different things appeal more to one person than to another.
By the time most people are thirty years old, their bodies are as good as they will ever be; in fact, many persons’ bodies have begun to deteriorate by that time. But there is no limit to the amount of growth and development that the mind can sustain.
The mind can atrophy, like the muscles, if it is not used. Atrophy of the mental muscles is the penalty that we pay for not taking mental exercise. And this is a terrible penalty, for there is evidence that atrophy of the mind is a mortal disease. There seems to be no other explanation for the fact that so many busy people die so soon after retirement. They were kept alive by the demands of their work upon their minds; they were propped up artificially, as it were, by external forces. But as soon as those demands cease, having no resources within themselves in the way of mental activity, they cease thinking altogether, and expire.
As we have pointed out several times, the primary aim is to read well, not widely. You should not be disappointed if you read no more than a handful of the books in a year.
Homer (9th century B.C.?) * Iliad * Odyssey 2. The Old Testament 3. Aeschylus (c. 525–456 B.C.) * Tragedies 4. Sophocles (c. 495–406 B.C.) * Tragedies 5. Herodotus (c. 484–425 B.C.) * History (of the Persian Wars) 6. Euripides (c. 485–406 B.C.) * Tragedies (esp. Medea, Hippolytus, The Bacchae) 7. Thucydides (c. 460–400 B.C.) * History of the Peloponnesian War 8. Hippocrates (c. 460–377? B.C.) * Medical writings 9. Aristophanes (c. 448–380 B.C.) * Comedies (esp. The Clouds, The Birds, The Frogs) 10. Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.) * Dialogues (esp. The Republic, Symposium, Phaedo, Meno, Apology, Phaedrus, Protagoras, Gorgias, Sophist, Theaetetus) 11. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) * Works (esp. Organon, Physics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Nichomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics) 12. ** Epicurus (c. 341–270 B.C.) Letter to Herodotus Letter to Menoeceus 13. Euclid (fl.c. 300 B.C.) * Elements (of Geometry) 14. Archimedes (c. 287–212 B.C.) * Works (esp. On the Equilibrium of Planes, On Floating Bodies, The Sand-Reckoner) 15. Apollonius of Perga (fl.c. 240 B.C.) * On Conic Sections 16. ** Cicero (106–43 B.C.) Works (esp. Orations, On Friendship, On Old Age) 17. Lucretius (c. 95–55 B.C.) * On the Nature of Things 18. Virgil (70–19 B.C.) * Works 19. Horace (65–8 B.C.) Works (esp. Odes and Epodes, The Art of Poetry) 20. Livy (59 B.C.–A.D. 17) History of Rome 21. Ovid (43 B.C.–A.D. 17) Works (esp. Metamorphoses) 22. ** Plutarch (c. 45–120) * Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans Moralia 23. ** Tacitus (c. 55–117) * Histories * Annals Agricola Germania 24. Nicomachus of Gerasa (fl.c. 100 A.D.) * Introduction to Arithmetic 25. ** Epictetus (c. 60–120) * Discourses Encheiridion (Handbook) 26. Ptolemy (c. 100–178; fl. 127–151) * Almagest 27. ** Lucian (c. 120–c. 190) Works (esp. The Way to Write History, The True History, The Sale of Creeds) 28. Marcus Aurelius (121–180) * Meditations 29. Galen (c. 130–200) * On the Natural Faculties 30. The New Testament 31. Plotinus (205–270) * The Enneads 32. St. Augustine (354–430) Works (esp. On the Teacher, * Confessions, * The City of God, * Christian Doctrine) 33. The Song of Roland (12th century?) 34. The Nibelungenlied (13th century) (The Völsunga Saga is the Scandinavian version of the same legend.) 35. The Saga of Burnt Njal 36. St. Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274) * Summa Theologica 37. ** Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) Works (esp. The New Life, On Monarchy, * The Divine Comedy) 38. Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) Works esp. * Troilus and Criseyde, * Canterbury Tales) 39. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) Notebooks 40. Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) * The Prince Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy 41. Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1469–1536) The Praise of Folly 42. Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) * On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres 43. Sir Thomas More (c. 1478–1535) Utopia 44. Martin Luther (1483–1546) Three Treatises Table-Talk 45. François Rabelais (c. 1495–1553) * Gargantua and Pantagruel 46. John Calvin (1509–…
- #books-to-read

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