This chapter mostly deals with using books to help read other books. Adler lists four types of aids (paraphrased):
1. Experiences
2. Other books
3. Commentaries
4. References
The experiences section is kind of scattered. He spends about half a page giving examples to illustrate the difference between common and universal. It does have a helpful check for if you understand a book. Can you give an example of the point(s) not included in the text? Very clean and direct, I like it.
He talks a bit about other books and THE GREAT CONVERSATION, but not in a ton of detail. (I'm not sure if The Great Conversation is cool, or just puffery.)
Commentaries, etc. are okay but should not be relied upon. Always read the book yourself before turning to them. I think this is broadly helpful, and something I wish something I'd been taught in school. I feel like often we have students read handbooks directly alongside or even in place of original texts.
The meat of this chapter is mostly about encyclopedias and dictionaries. He calls dictionaries "a self-help book" which is a fun little bit of linguistic change since HtRAB was written. There's a good amount about how to use them effectively, what should and shouldn't be in them, etc. It's mostly valid, if a bit overwritten (like most of HtRaB). Something that's interesting is his repeated insistence that you shouldn't read a book "in one hand, with a dictionary in the other." I broadly agree (if you need to look up that much, you won't make much sense of it, as Adler points out), but it's funny that we can not hold the dictionary in the same hand as we read digitally. I definitely use the lookup function on my ereader more than I ever did a physical dictionary. Much quicker and less disruptive.
That ends the "general" section of HtRaB, and moves into more format/genre specific ones. Like I said, I'm going to skip around a bit here, and might not finish this whole section. I want to be done with this book before I dive into The Gateway... in April.
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