How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Charles van Doren Read Free Book Online Page A

or need to read it at all. In either case, you may put it aside for the moment. If you do not do so, you are now ready to skim the book, properly speaking.
    5. 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. If these chapters have Summary statements in their opening or closing pages, as they often do, read these statements carefully.
    6. Finally, TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT. Thumb through the book in this way, always looking for signs of the main contention, listening for the basic pulsebeat of the matter. Above all, do not fail to read the last two or three pages, or, if these are an epilogue, the last few pages of the main part of the book. 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.
    You have now skimmed the book systematically; you have given it the first type of inspectional reading. You should know a good deal about the book at this point, after having spent no more than a few minutes, at most an hour, with it. In particular, you should know whether the book contains matter that you still want to dig out, or whether it deserves no more of your time and attention. You should also be able to place the book even more accurately than before in your mental card catalogue, for further reference if the occasion should ever arise.
    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. How many times have you daydreamed through several pages of a good book only to wake up to the realization that you have no idea of the ground you have gone over? That cannot happen if you follow the steps outlined here-that is, if you have a system for following a general thread.
    Think of yourself as a detective looking for clues to a book's general theme or idea, alert for anything that will make it clearer. Heeding the suggestions we have made will help you sustain this attitude. You will be surprised to find out how much time you will save, pleased to see how much more you will grasp, and relieved to discover how much easier it all can be than you supposed.
    lnspectional Reading I I : Superficial Reading
    The title of this section is intentionally provocative. The word "superficial" ordinarily has a negative connotation. We are quite serious, however, in using the term.
    Everyone has had the experience of struggling fruitlessly with a difficult book that was begun with high hopes of enlightenment. It is natural enough to conclude that it was a mistake to try to read it in the first place. But that was not the mistake. Rather it was in expecting too much from the first going over of a difficult book. Approached in the right way, no book intended for the general reader, no matter how difficult, need be a cause for despair.
    What is the right approach? The answer lies in an important and helpful rule of reading that is generally overlooked.
    That rule is simply this: 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.
    Pay attention to what you can understand and do not be stopped by what you cannot immediately grasp. Go right on reading past the point where you have difficulties in understanding, and you will soon come to things you do understand.
    Concentrate on these. Keep on in this way. Read the book through, undeterred and undismayed by the paragraphs, footnotes, comments, and references that escape you. If you let yourself get stalled, if you allow yourself to be tripped up by any one of these stumbling blocks, you are lost.