I feel like Adler is starting to get a little punch drunk in these later chapters. After rambling about how he invented this cool new Synoptical Reading thing, he says in this chapter that we're probably least familiar with Analytical Reading. I think most people have at least a passing familiarity with close reading. I also want to push back (in a narrow case) on his assertion that fun/shallow books can't be developmental. They can be if, as an active reader (like he wants you to be) you critique them, think about how they can be improved etc. Obviously, the number of people who feel the need to or can gain much from critiquing trash sci-fi novels, but it's not nothing. He goes into a standard rant about how 99% of books are trash, fair. He then says there's probably a few thousand books worth reading once. I think this is a vast underestimating the number of books published per year (can't find a number for when this was published, but millions are published per year these days. Even if you knock it down to a hundred thousand a year, and one book in one thousand being worth reading, that's still a hundred a year. He goes on to say that a mere hundred in all of history are worth rereading. This is comically low. Even if we only go as far back as 1AD, that would mean something like 1 rereadable book came out every 20 years. He does specify that this is specific to each person, so I suppose an entire decade could pass where no book you were interested in rereading came out, but that seems like quite a stretch.
Finally, read books that challenge you, exercise your brain, etc. All pretty standard.
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