How to Read (and Understand) Hard Books

so maybe you're someone who wants to read hard books but maybe you're also worried that you're not going to be able to understand a book or get the most out of it this is a common anxiety from beginners but truthfully even people who have advanced degrees often struggle with getting the most out of what they read so today I want to go over a bit of a guide on how to get the most out of what you read and I am going to use the great Mortimer Adler's book how to read a book as my

guide but we're going to talk about Adler's levels of reading and talk about how we can use some of the techniques that Adler suggests in order to get the most out of what we read so there are four types of reading Elementary inspectional analytical and synoptical Elementary reading has to do with just being able to understand a single sentence or understanding words I'm not going to talk about Elementary reading all that much I'm going to assume that all of us are basically literate and can do that kind of reading for ourselves inspectional reading is a

kind of quick overview of a text that is going to allow us to figure out what a book is about and give us a sense of familiarity with the book that's going to prepare us for a deeper level of reading later and that deeper level of reading is the analytical read most of this video will be us talking about analytical reading which will come up in just a little bit and then there's synoptical reading which comes after analytical reading I won't talk about that too much in this video but if you stick around to the

end you will hear me give some tips for that as well as we talk about the different levels of reading we're going to use one book as an example this is why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens I've been reading a lot of Orwell lately I wanted to read a little bit of secondary literature and since I like what Christopher Hitchens usually writes I decided that I would read his book on Orwell so the very first thing that you need to figure out about a book in order to understand it is to figure out what the

book is about and that seems like such an obvious thing but most of us skip that step when we want to start reading a book what we do is we pick it up off the shelf we open it to page one and we just start reading and that's because we usually content ourselves with a very superficial answer to the question what is this book about so if we're looking at Hitchens his book we might just say that the book is about George Orwell and why he matters but if we want to go a little bit

deeper and answer that question we need to inspect this book first there are a couple things you can do you can look at the back of the book and read the blurb you can look at the table of contents and look at the different topics that are going to be addressed if the book has an index you could look there to see what kinds of topics come up again and again unfortunately this book does not have an index but a lot of books of philosophy or criticism or something like that will have index and they're

very helpful and then finally you might want to do a quick read of the introduction so as I quickly read through the introduction of this book and I look at the table of contents I get a sense of what this book is about I I've started to think that what Hitchens is going to argue is that Orwell is frequently misunderstood and misinterpreted and that we need to look at some of his less popular writings in order to better understand that this is the kind of book that's going to talk about a forgotten or a misinterpreted

Orwell rather rather than the Orwell you think you know because you read Animal Farm in 1984 now just doing that quick inspection of this book has been really helpful for one sometimes when you do that you're going to realize that you're not ready to read this book I'm someone who's read a fair amount of the non-fiction of orell so I feel like reading this book is good for me right now but maybe you've never read any of Orwell's essays and if you notice that Hitchens is going to talk a lot about the essays you might

want to go and read those first it also might help you to figure out which chapters are going to be most interesting to you if you have a particular interest in feminism well chapter six of this book Orwell and the feminist is probably going to be the chapter that most interests you so maybe you might even read that chapter first to see if it pays off so Adler calls this whole inspection we've just done the pre-read by pre-reading a book We Now understand what it's about and we're going to feel a little bit more comfortable

as we go in and read it the next step is to actually start reading the book but we're going to read it really quickly and Adler calls this step The Superficial read and he still calls this part of inspectional reading but Adler gives one important rule you don't stop to ponder or look up anything that you don't understand that's going to come later when we get to analytical reading as you do this superficial reading you're going to want to make some light annotations so grab a pencil and get started when we're doing all of this

stuff Adler says that we are trying to achieve understanding or even Enlightenment it's all part of this broader project of learning new things we're all trying to learn new things and if that's the kind of thing that interests you then I want to talk to you about today's sponsor skillshare you've probably heard about skillshare it's an online community where you can take courses learn new skills and learn how to put them to work by joining skillshare you get access to any and all of the courses in their catalog two of the courses that I have

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link down below will get a free month of skill share so go check it out and see what you could be learning thank you again to skillshare for helping me make this video so let's Flash Forward in time a bit and let's assume that I have done my superficial read of this book later on I'm going to want to come back and do my analytical read the analytical read is where you actually dive deep into the text where you make heavier and heavier annotations and you take real notes and you try to get everything you

can out of this book we can say that there are six steps to analytical reading the first one is to just classify the book if you've already done your inspectional read you've basically done this so we'll keep this quick we know that this is a work of non-fiction since it's about George Orwell we can get a little bit more specific and we can say that it's a work of literary criticism and we might even say that it's about political writing because of the table of contents so we'll just say that this is a work of

literary criticism focused on political writing and in particular George Orwell so now we've classified the book we kind of know how to engage with the book understanding that the book is a work of non-fiction means that we're going to treat it very differently than if it were a novel or a poetry collection the second step is to x-ray the book this is roughly what we did by systematically skimming the book and then by pre-reading we are just looking through the book and trying to see what we can find here's another thing that you could learn

if you just look through the table of contents here there are 10 chapters here and each one seems relatively self-contained while all of the chapters are about similarish topics none of them seem to clearly build on each other so that means that these are written a little bit more like independent essays rather than say a biography of George Orwell which would be written in mostly chronological order let me give you a quick other example of a different kind of book so you can see how looking at structure can be very Illuminating I've been working on

a project where I read a lot of political philosophy and one of the things I needed to learn about was Marxism well I could read all of like the works of Marx but I wanted some kind of big history to help me understand the development of Marxism throughout history and that's why I started reading leak kolakowski main currents of Marxism this book is thick and dense as you can tell I'm not actually very far if we look at the structure of this book what we actually discover is that it's three volumes and that's because kakowski

actually wrote three books and it later got put into one big book and those volumes are called the founders the Golden Age and the breakdown so you can tell this is a very critical history of Marxism it's going to start with all of the early philosophical influences that sort of lay a foundation for Marx it's going to go through the height of Marx is writing and then his early reception and then it's going to lead to what kak Housey calls the breakdown every volume Builds on the previous volume and every chapter Builds on the previous

chapter so this is a very different kind of book than hitchin' book on Orwell hitch's book on Orwell might let me skip around to just see what I want to read kolakowski book probably needs to be read from front to back probably many times over to get the most out of it so now as we continue our analytical reading where we're really deeply reading this book from front to back we are coming to step three which is to come to terms with the author and what this means is that we need to Define key terms

that the author uses on a regular basis here's a term that you probably don't even think about defining when you read a book like this but it's actually pretty important and that's George Orwell it would be helpful if you could write a sentence or two to describe who Orwell was and when he lived but just looking at some terms here we're going to need to Define what left and right mean mean in politics what feminism means what postmodernism means and that is just the start as I read the rest of this book I will find

terms that I don't understand or that I think are interesting and I'm going to want to see how Hitchens defines them this by the way is crucial when you start reading philosophy which is really my specialty you need to be able to understand the terms that a philosopher employs and you need to be able to Define them for yourself this is crucial in philosophy but actually it's helpful for any kind of non-fiction so the next step in your analytical reading is to determine the author's message since I am talking about this book before I have

read it all the way through I can't tell you in detail what hitchin' message is in why Orwell matters I gave you a very general idea of it early on when I said it would be about why Orwell still matters in the 21st century and how we commonly misinterpret him but that's a very general answer what we want to know actually are the specific ways that people have misinterpreted him the specific ways in which Orwell still matters today after all anybody could write this the sentence Orwell still matters in the 21st century but that just

wouldn't be interesting you could write that without even reading Orwell but of course Hitchens is very familiar with Orwell and he's going to make arguments and evidence and we want to see what he actually says what we want to do is identify the specific positions and then figure out not just what Hitchin says about Orwell but why he says it and once we figured out that why question we're able to move to step five which is to criticize the book fairly in order to criticize a book fairly we want to do our best to actually

understand what an author says and why he says it and then we want to see whether or not what he says is true we want to look at the author's arguments but we also want to look at the different kinds of arguments that we could come up with for either those same positions or for contrary positions it's helpful here to play Devil's Advocate and make arguments that you might not yet find convincing just to try them out all of this is part of a process of engaging with ideas and I would say that once you've

started into this step this is where we can say that you really have a grasp on the material because not only can you say what Hitchens said and not only can you say why Hitchens said what he said you can actually figure out whether or not Hitchens was right and the sixth step is to decide your own conclusion now you've been working towards this in step five but in Step six what you're doing is trying to come to a bit of a final pronouncement I understand that it can feel a little bit strange to come

to a final pronouncement about a book uh as if it's almost disrespectful here again because after all the book has shown itself to be complex and interesting and nuanced well your position about why you disagree with it should also be complex and interesting and nuanced there's no disrespect in saying that you disagree with a book there's no disrespect in saying that an author that you read and even admired was dead wrong about something by taking their ideas seriously reading their books thoroughly and then engaging with the ideas in good faith you are showing the ultimate

respect even if you come to the conclusion that they are are absolutely wrong so this brings us to Adler's final kind of reading synoptical reading synoptical reading involves reading multiple books about the same subject generating a bibliography or a list of books that you want to read reading all of them analytically and then comparing how they use terms how they come to their different positions comparing their arguments and assessing them in conversation with one another so it's not just me having this conversation with Hitchens through his book but it's me and Hitchens and Orwell and

other political writers all having a conversation together that is the art of synoptical reading but synoptical reading is difficult it's the kind of thing that if you go and get a PhD in the humanities you spend a lot of time developing that skill and even after you've developed it for a while it still takes a lot of work but for now I would say we can just focus on working on our analytical reading skills so that when we read a single hard book we can still get the most out of it