Strange Loops: Reading a Book on How to Read a Book
Dear Zettlers,
Currently, I am slowly processing “How to Read a Book” by Adler and
van Doren.
It is a classic book on reading, which I read more than a decade ago.
Contrary to the contemporary praise, I didn’t like it. The reason is
that you can learn a lot about reading, but I didn’t find anything
actionable. It reminded me of the SQ3R reading method which we learned
in university, only to find out that in practice nobody uses it.
I think there are two undervalued aspects of developing reading skills:
- Problem-solving skills, in particular decision-making skills. By
far, the best paper I read on this issue is “Detailed
Characterization of the Expert Problem-Solving Process in Science
and Engineering: Guidance for Teaching and Assessment”[^argenta]
Each book should be treated as a problem to be solved: How to
attack it? How much time to invest in it, and how to spread this
time over the chapters (evenly or weighted)? How can I re-construct
it, so I learn the most? Is this a book that should be treated as
inspiration, or should I really make an effort to re-create the
content in my own words? - Pattern recognition. There are general patterns like arguments,
walls of empirical evidence (“XY et al. performed a study and the
results were like this. Z et al. performed a study and the results
were like this”), anecdotes as evidence surrogates (epistemic
blunder) vs anecdotes as illustrations (legit didactic tool) etc.
There are also specific patterns (e.g., typical patterns of studies
on dietary interventions).
This is the reason I am re-reading the book: Since my goal is to
deepen my reading skills further and improve my coaching, I will
process this book with the goal to create thinking tools that help
with the above skills. Most likely, this book will be exploitable for
the first type of skills.
Your takeaways:
- Be highly intentional when you read. Intention creates
intensity. If a book truly grips you, intensity can be treated as a
given. However, in most of the cases, you will lack the intensity
necessary to get the most out of your reading. In numbers:
Sometimes, I catch myself reading papers with no deliberately
created intensity. Then, it takes me 4–6 times (!) longer to work
through the paper, while getting less out of it, compared to a mode
with proper intensity. - Focus on developing two sets of skills. Meta-skills (1st
category) and higher-level reading skills (2nd category). How do
you do this? This is what I am trying to work out. I am a stage in
which I can explain my individual decisions and can walk other
people through their individual decisions as a (Socratic) guide.
However, this is not enough. The next step will be to develop an
inventory of exercises, which then will develop into a system that
makes actionable what Adler and van Doren provide on a more
theoretical level. But then, I will add patterns and pattern
recognition exercises of the 2nd.
What if you want to take action right now?
- Read the book How to Read a Book and keep in mind that it tells
you a lot about reading. Your task is then to transform this book
into action items (templates, checklists, workflows) and then put
aside training time (e.g., create strategy plans on how to read and
process for 20 books). One important step in the whole value
creation chain of reading this book is to put it into practice.
Practice is the habit of deliberately improving a skill. - Subscribe to the newsletter. Oh, the fact that are reading this
right now means that you are already subscribed. Then you will be
updated when and how I will publish the material on reading.
Live long and prosper,
Sascha