how read a book

How To Read A Book

The purpose of this book to teach readers to make books teach them well so that they can progress from a state of knowing less to a state of knowing more.

Why I picked it up

I think I had heard of this book before, but I grabbed a copy and started reading it in earnest after reading How To Read A Code by Jonas:

https://www.iamjonas.me/2020/08/how-to-read-code.html

There are three reasons to read a book

1. Entertainment

2. Information

3. Understanding. Learning, Knowledge

This book is primarily about type 3 reading

Types of learning

1. Aided, as with a teacher

2. Unaided, as with learning from nature/the world, or from experience, or with a book.

Unaided instruction is also called "discovery." And aided instruction may also be called "aided discovery." For teaching, like farming and (most) health care, it has no direct effect. The burden is on the subject, the reader, the crop, the patient to learn, grow, and be well.

Note: the author's initial description of unaided discovery is exactly what it feels like to read a new codebase and try to discovery meaning, context, and connections in it. This application of the framework continues at length later on in Inspectional Reading.

There are four levels of reading

1. Elementary Reading

2. Inspectional Reading: usually extremely timeboxed. An hour or less. Get as much information as you can about the book in 60 minutes or less.

   • pre-reading: read the TOC, preface, and index. Glance at chapter intros and summaries. Etc. Dip in a read a paragraph or two of any section.

   • superficial reading: read straight on past the difficult parts you don't understand. meaning will be more evident on a later, closer reading.

3. Analytical Reading

   • Pigeon-holing: identify the type of book. Is it fiction or expository? If expository, is it theoretical or practical? If theoretical, is it chronotopic or science or philosophy.

     If a theoretical book emphasizes things that lie outside the scope of your normal, routine, daily experience, it is a scientific work. If not, it is philosophical.

   • X-Raying a book. The unity and multliplicity of a book are, respectively, its central theme or plot, and its structure or outline.

4. Syntopic Reading

Four questions of a demanding reader

1. What is the point of this book?

2. What is being said in detail, and how?

3. Is it true, in part or in whole?

4. What of it?

Three Types of Notes

Correlates closely to the Four Questions of Demanding Readers

1. Structural: What's the point? How is it being made? What is the structure?

2. Conceptual: What is the author claiming? Is it true?

3. Dialectical: In what way is the author engaging with the broader syntopical discussion of the subject matter?

Four Rules for Analytical Reading

The First Stage of Analytical Reading, or Rules for Finding What a Book Is About:

1. Classify the book according to kind and subject matter.

2. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity.

3. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole.

4. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.

More rules for analytical reading

about terms and propositions, penetrating beneath the surface of language

interpretive reading

5. Find the important words and through them come to terms with the author

6. Mark the most important sentences in a book and discover the propositions they contain.

7. Locate or construct the basic arguments in the book by finding them in the connection of sentences