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How to read a book?

The question seems easy; fairly obvious, in fact. You pick a book and start reading it. Of course, this works only if you are a literate person, otherwise it can be a bit of nightmare. But… if we go back to the question and give it a deep thought, we find more interesting ways to look at it. Charles Van Doren, a 20th-century American writer, did exactly that in his book How to Read a Book. The book was published almost eighty years ago, but the lessons remain as valuable today as they were then, or as they will be in future.

So, where do we begin?

Let’s begin with the activity of reading. It is an activity, which means, all reading must — to some degree — be active. Completely passive reading is not possible at all. Yet, the whole reading experience, or value derived from it, completely depends on how more or less active we are. The more active the reading the better.

Reading is often compared with listening, and is considered as receiving communication from someone who has either written or spoken. The mistake here is that receiving communication is assumed to be like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgement from the court — where you have no say at all. On the contrary, a reader (or listener) is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball. The reader’s role cannot be ignored. Catching the ball is just as much important as pitching or hitting it.

We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch — fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers. Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.

Reading for Information and Reading for Understanding:

You have a mind. Now let us suppose that you also have a book that you want to read. As you go through the pages, either you understand perfectly everything the author has to say or you do not. If you do, you may have gained information, but you could not have increased your understanding. If the book is completely intelligible to you from start to finish, then the author and you are as two minds in the same mold. The symbols on the page merely express the common understanding you had before you met.

Let us take our second alternative. You do not understand the book perfectly. Let us even assume that you understand enough to know that you do not understand it at all. You know the book has more to say than you understand and hence that it contains something that can increase your understanding.

What do you do then? You can take the book to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have them explain the parts that trouble you. Or you may decide that what is over your head is not worth bothering about, that you understand enough. In either case, you are not doing the job of reading that the book requires.

That is done in only one way. 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 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.

To understand the difference between reading for information and reading for understanding, consider two scenarios.

The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else, according to our skills and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us. Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth — that is, if we were both alert and honest.

The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he or she does not completely understand. Here the thing to read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between the unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

What are the conditions under which this kind of reading — reading for understanding — takes place? There are two. First, there is initial inequality in understanding. The writer must be superior to reader in understanding, and their book must convey in readable form the insights they possess and their potential readers lack. Second, the reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree, seldom perhaps fully, but always approaching equality with the writer. To the extent that equality is approached, clarity of communication is achieved.