Little Shop of Knowledge

I'll be honest. I did not read "How to Read a Book", but this I'll tell you: You don't read a book by waiting on someone else (teacher, parent, etc)  to tell you when and how to read it. You also don't read it by leaving it in a shelf in hopes of getting to it "when you have time." I hope to read and document it before second year, but for now this is what I've got. 

 

 

 

The above statement was written this past summer. Today (September 27, 2013) I've taken a different approach at How to Read a Book and after re-reading certain chapters I see the value not just in reading in general but in reading this book. 

 

Adler explains how in reading you basically find two major purposes: gaining knowledge and gaining understanding. Gaining knowledge in a way is just accumulating information, while gaining understanding means transforming your view of the world. In a way you want to read books from an author which has a higher level of understanding in order to grasp it and grow intellectually, how to measure this depends to you. Sometimes a book may be impossible to understand so you might want to move An author communicates through the written word. An analogy I found very useful in Adler's words was that of playing baseball. The batter is the writer, the ball is the message, and the catcher is the reader. The only difference in the analogy is that a ball you either catch it completely or you don't while in a book you can take certain ideas sometimes many sometimes few, knowing "how to read a book" aims at gaining as much as possible from reading.  m

 

Types of reading:

1. Elementary (Basic interpretation of written symbols)

2. Inspectional (Skimming in order to obtain an idea of the material you're about to approach)

3. Analytical (Understanding a book in depth)

4. Sintopical (connecting your reading with several books and other material)