Sunday, February 23, 2025

How To Read a Book Ch 5: How To Be a Demanding Reader

Active/demanding/whatever you want to call it requires several different skills to help you pay attention, understand the book, and interact with it. Marking (basically the same as the article I read earlier), asking questions, etc. He compares learning to read well to skiing or art. You need to learn a bunch of different rules/skills, practice them individually, and then learn how to use them automatically together.

It starts with a great line, "The rules for reading yourself to sleep are easier to follow than the rules for saying awake while reading." (Which involve not enough light.)

He lists four key questions:

1. What is the book about as a whole?

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

3. Is the book true, in whole or part?

4. What of it? 

This was a pretty overviewish chapter. Hopefully more detail later. 

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