How To Read a Book - Templates and Cards

How To Read a Book

I discussed how to read a book here.

On this page, I would like to create a short set of checklists that can be used to perform the steps which are required for read a book with the objective of gain understanding.

Inspectional Reading

Analytical Reading

Finding What the Book is About

Cards

Reading cards

Reading objectives

Four core questions need to be answered when reading a book:

1. What is the book about? Identifying the central theme and following how the author develops it.
2. What and how the message is detailed in the book? Finding the main ideas that carry the argument.
3. Do we agree with the conclusions of the book? Evaluating the content critically.
4. How useful is this book for us? How relevant that information is to us.

Inspectional reading

Inspectional reading is characterized by time: we want to maximize the amount of information that can be retrieve in that particular amount of time.

Systematic skimming

1. We should look at the title page and preface. With these information, and based on other similar book we might have read in the past, we should be able to place it in the proper category.
2. We should then look at the table of contents that should describe the book structure. Often the author invested a considerable amount of time creating it.
3. We should move to the index. We can look at some of term that seems important and have a quick look of some paragraphs.
4. We should then read the publisher description. Often it is written by the author together with the marketing team, and might contains something about the book.

Detailed skimming

5. From the general understanding of the contents achieved in point 1-3, we should focus on the chapters that seem to be the most important, and then read the summary or closing statements of these chapter if they are present.
6. As last step, we should turn the pages, read a few paragraphs, eventually a few pages. We should always read the last few pages and the epilogue if present. Most of the authors will summarize again what they think is relevant at the end.

Analytical reading

Analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that can be performed given unlimited time.

Finding what the book is about

to find what the book is about we need to perform four steps:

1. Classify the book between fictional or expository. If the book is expository, should be further classified between theoretical (history / science or philosophy) and practical.
2. State the core idea (the “unity”) of a book in a single sentence, the shorter the better.
3. Split the contents in units and sub-units, so that each part can be described more in details.
4. Define the questions the author is trying to answer. They might be explicit or hidden.

Understanding what the book says

To understand what the book says we need to perform four steps:

5. Find the author’s key words and understand their precise meaning, as most of the words have more than one meaning and can different in different places even in the same book.
6. Find the author propositions and restate it in our own words.
7. Find or construct the author arguments, which might be assembled across paragraphs or even across chapters.
8. Determine which problems have solutions which may have remained unresolved.

Criticizing a book

Etiquette

Before starting the dialog with the author through judgment and critics, the contents and the messages should be well understood:

9. Ensure that the book is understood before judge it.
10. Disagree reasonably, not contentiously.
11. Respect the difference between judgments and opinions.

Points of criticism

When have understood the book, and we want to show points of criticism we can show that:

12. The author is uninformed.
13. The author is misinformed.
14. The analysis is illogical.
15. The analysis is incomplete.

Syntopical reading

There are two stages, one which is preparatory, the other which is the actual proper syntopical reading.

Preparatory stage

1. Create a bibliography for the subject under study.
2. Perform inspectional reading of all the material, and then select a subset for further analysis.

Analysis stage

1. Find the relevant passages.
2. Bring all the authors to terms.
3. Clarify the questions.
4. Define the issues.
5. Analyze the discussion.

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