How-to-Read-a-Book on Janusworx

How to Read a Book: 009, Elementary Reading, The First Level

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:16:23 +0530

The book now dives into the Four Levels of Reading.

We tackle notes from the First Level of Reading, Elementary Reading, today

Stages of Learning to Read
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1. First Stage of Learning to read (Reading Readiness)
This begins, at birth, and continues normally until the age of about six or seven. Reading readiness includes several different kinds of preparation for learning to read.
Physical readiness involves good vision and hearing. Intellectual readiness involves a minimum level of visual perception such that the child can take in and remember an entire word and the letters that combine to form it.
Language readiness involves the ability to speak clearly and to use several sentences in correct order.
Personal readiness involves the ability to work with other children, to sustain attention, to follow directions, and the like.
General reading readiness is assessed by tests and is also estimated by teachers who are often skillful at discerning just when a pupil is ready to learn to read.

2. Second Stage: Simple Material Reading Children learn to read very simple materials.
They usually begin, by learning a few sight words, and typically manage to master perhaps three hundred to four hundred words by the end of the first year. Basic skills are introduced at this time, such as the use of context or meaning clues and the beginning sounds of words.

The Miracle of Reading
It is incidentally worth observing that something quite mysterious, almost magical, occurs during this stage.
At one moment in the course of her development the child, when faced with a series of symbols on a page, finds them quite meaningless. Not much later—perhaps only two or three weeks later—she has discovered meaning in them; she knows that they say “The cat sat on the hat.”
How this happens no one really knows, despite the efforts of philosophers and psychologists over two and a half millennia to study the phenomenon. Where does meaning come from? How is it that a French child would find the same meaning in the symbols “Le chat s’asseyait sur le chapeau”?
Indeed, this discovery of meaning in symbols may be the most astounding intellectual feat that any human being ever performs—and most humans perform it before they are seven years old!

3.Third Stage: Vocabulary Acquisition
The third stage is characterized by rapid progress in vocabulary building and by increasing skill in “unlocking” the meaning of unfamiliar words through context clues.

4. Fourth Stage: Assimilation
Finally, the fourth stage is characterized by the refinement and enhancement of the skills previously acquired. Above all, the student begins to be able to assimilate his reading experiences—that is, to carry over concepts from one piece of writing to another, and to compare the views of different writers on the same subject. This, the mature stage of reading, should be reached by young persons in their early teens. Ideally, they should continue to build on it for the rest of their lives.

Stages and Levels
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It is of paramount importance to recognize that the four stages outlined here are all stages of the first level of reading

The first stage of elementary reading—reading readiness—corresponds to pre-school and kindergarten experiences.

The second stage—word mastery—corresponds to the first grade experience of the typical child (although many quite normal children are not “typical” in this sense), with the result that the child attains what we can call second-stage reading skills, or first grade ability in reading or first grade literacy.

The third stage of elementary reading—vocabulary growth and the utilization of context—is typically (but not universally, even for normal children) acquired at about the end of the fourth grade of elementary school and results in what is variously called fourth grade, or functional, literacy—the ability, according to one common definition, to read traffic signs or picture captions fairly easily, to fill out the simpler government forms, and the like.

The fourth and final stage of elementary reading is attained at about the time the pupil leaves or graduates from elementary school or junior high school. It is sometimes called eighth grade, ninth grade, or tenth grade literacy. The child is a “mature” reader in the sense that he is now capable of reading almost anything, but still in a relatively unsophisticated manner. In the simplest terms, he is mature enough to do high school work.

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How to Read a Book: 008, More On the Activity and the Art of Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Tue, 19 Aug 2025 14:40:20 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference
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To be informed is to know simply that something is the case.
To be enlightened is to know, in addition, what it is all about: why it is the case, what its connections are with other facts, in what respects it is the same, in what respects it is different, and so forth.
This distinction is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
[…] you have gained nothing but information if you have exercised only your memory. You have not been enlightened. Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

It is true, of course, that you should be able to remember what the author said as well as know what he meant. Being informed is prerequisite to being enlightened. The point, however, is not to stop at being informed.

Montaigne speaks of “an abecedarian ignorance that precedes knowledge, and a doctoral ignorance that comes after it.”
The first is the ignorance of those who, not knowing their ABC’s, cannot read at all.
The second is the ignorance of those who have misread many books.
They are, as Alexander Pope rightly calls them, bookful blockheads, ignorantly read. There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

Art of Reading
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The process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading.

What is Reading? A couple of meanings …
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1. When you already know things

The first sense is the one in which we speak of ourselves as reading newspapers, magazines, or anything else that, according to our skill and talents, is at once thoroughly intelligible to us.
Such things may increase our store of information, but they cannot improve our understanding, for our understanding was equal to them before we started. Otherwise, we would have felt the shock of puzzlement and perplexity that comes from getting in over our depth—that is, if we were both alert and honest

2. When you understand new things

The second sense is the one in which a person tries to read something that at first he does not completely understand.
Here the thing to be read is initially better or higher than the reader. The writer is communicating something that can increase the reader’s understanding. Such communication between unequals must be possible, or else one person could never learn from another, either through speech or writing. Here by “learning” is meant understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.

On Reading as Discovery
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The distinction between being informed vs being enlightened is familiar in terms of the differences between being able to remember something and being able to explain it.
Enlightenment is achieved only when, in addition to knowing what an author says, you know what he means and why he says it.

To avoid error of assuming that to be widely read and to be well-read are the same thing—we must consider a certain distinction in types of learning.

In the history of education, people have often distinguished between learning by instruction and learning by discovery. Instruction occurs when one person teaches another through speech or writing. We can, however, gain knowledge without being taught. If this were not the case, and every teacher had to be taught what he in turn teaches others, there would be no beginning in the acquisition of knowledge. Hence, there must be discovery—the process of learning something by research, by investigation, or by reflection, without being taught.

Discovery stands to instruction as learning without a teacher stands to learning through the help of one. In both cases, the activity of learning goes on in the one who learns. It would be a mistake to suppose that discovery is active learning and instruction passive. There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading.
This is so true, in fact, that a better way to make the distinction clear is to call instruction “aided discovery.”

The difference between learning by instruction and learning by discovery—or, as we would prefer to say, between aided and unaided discovery—is primarily a difference in the materials on which the learner works. When he is being instructed—discovering with the help of a teacher—the learner acts on something communicated to her. She performs operations on discourse, written or oral. She learns by acts of reading or listening.
When, however, the learner proceeds without the help of any sort of teacher, the operations of learning are performed on nature or the world rather than on discourse. The rules of such learning constitute the art of unaided discovery. If we use the word “reading” loosely, we can say that discovery—strictly, unaided discovery—is the art of reading nature or the world, as instruction (being taught, or aided discovery) is the art of reading books or, to include listening, of learning from discourse.

Thinking is only one part of the activity of learning. One must also use one’s senses and imagination. One must observe, and remember, and construct imaginatively what cannot be observed. There is, again, a tendency to stress the role of these activities in the process of unaided discovery and to forget or minimize their place in the process of being taught through reading or listening. For example, many people assume that though a poet must use his imagination in writing a poem, they do not have to use their imagination in reading it.

The art of reading, in short, includes all of the same skills that are involved in the art of unaided discovery: keenness of observation, readily available memory, range of imagination, and, of course, an intellect trained in analysis and reflection. The reason for this is that reading in this sense is discovery, too—although with help instead of without it.

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead)
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We have been proceeding as if reading and listening could both be treated as learning from teachers. To some extent that is true. Both are ways of being instructed, and for both one must be skilled in the art of being taught. Listening to a course of lectures, for example, is in many respects like reading a book; and listening to a poem is like reading it.
Yet there is good reason to place primary emphasis on reading, and let listening become a secondary concern. The reason is that listening is learning from a teacher who is present—a living teacher—while reading is learning from one who is absent.

If you ask a living teacher a question, she will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what she says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking her what he means.
If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking and analysis yourself.

This does not mean, of course, that if the living teacher answers your question, you have no further work. That is so only if the question is simply one of fact. But if you are seeking an explanation, you have to understand it or nothing has been explained to you. Nevertheless, with the living teacher available to you, you are given a lift in the direction of understanding her, as you are not when the teacher’s words in a book are all you have to go by.

[…] (for us readers though) our continuing education depends mainly on books alone, read without a teacher’s help. Therefore if we are disposed to go on learning and discovering, we must know how to make books teach us well. Reading, like unaided discovery, is learning from an absent teacher.

[2]:

How to Read a Book: 007, Highlights from the Activity and the Art of Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 18 Aug 2025 18:55:42 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

Paraphrased and excerpted as usual …

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us …
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One of the reasons for this situation is that the very media we have mentioned are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary (though this is only an appearance).
The packaging of intellectual positions and views is one of the most active enterprises of some of the best minds of our day. The viewer of television, the listener to radio, the reader of magazines, (the “consumer” of modern internet streams —mjb) is presented with a whole complex of elements—all the way from ingenious rhetoric to carefully selected data and statistics—to make it easy for one to “make up one’s own mind” with the minimum of difficulty and effort.
But the packaging is often done so effectively that the viewer, listener, or reader does not make up their own mind at all. Instead, they inserts a packaged opinion into their mind, somewhat like inserting a cassette into a cassette player. They then push a button and “play back” the opinion whenever it seems appropriate to do so. They have performed acceptably without having had to think.

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s
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Since reading of any sort is an activity, all reading must to some degree be active. Completely passive reading is impossible; we cannot read with our eyes immobilized and our minds asleep. Hence when we contrast active with passive reading, our purpose is, first, to call attention to the fact that reading can be more or less active, and second, to point out that the more active the reading the better.

Reading and listening are commonly thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that receiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court.
On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball.
Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different.
If anything is passive, it is the ball. It is the inert thing that is put in motion or stopped, whereas the players are active, moving to pitch, hit, or catch. The analogy with writing and reading is almost perfect. The thing that is written and read, like the ball, is the passive object common to the two activities that begin and terminate the process.

We can take this analogy a step further. The art of catching is the skill of catching every kind of pitch—fast balls and curves, changeups and knucklers.
Similarly, the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible.

It is noteworthy that the pitcher and catcher are successful only to the extent that they cooperate. The relation of writer and reader is similar. Successful communication occurs in any case where what the writer wanted to have received finds its way into the reader’s possession. The writer’s skill and the reader’s skill converge upon a common end.

There is one respect in which the analogy breaks down. The ball is a simple unit. It is either completely caught or not.
A piece of writing, however, is a complex object. It can be received more or less completely, all the way from very little of what the writer intended to the whole of it. The amount the reader “catches” will usually depend on the amount of activity he puts into the process, as well as upon the skill with which he executes the different mental acts involved.

What does active reading entail?
Given the same thing to read, one person reads it better than another, first, by reading it more actively, and second, by performing each of the acts involved more skillfully. These two things are related.
Reading is a complex activity, just as writing is.
It consists of a large number of separate acts, all of which must be performed in a good reading. The person who can perform more of them is better able to read.

How to Read a Book: 006, Own Your Book

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 19:02:52 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

I’ve always been precious about the physical books, I have.
Partly because the books I read when I was a child, didn’t belong to me.
And so, I wrote notes. Gentle pencil marks as I read (to be erased, before I returned them), and then writing them all out into a notebook (and later typed in to a computer when I could afford one.)

I’ve longed to write in the damned books themselves, but old habits die hard. Until I read Adler, that is.

And then the clouds parted.

Marking a book, making it your own, highlighting it, questioning it, raging at it, whispering to it, completing the conversation, the author wishes to have with you … all of it, is such a sheer, physical, visceral experience.
I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner. Better late than never though. I’ve been marking every physical book and highlighting and annotating every electronic book, ever since I got back into reading, ten years ago.

Here’s Adler on why one needs to physically manhandle a book.¹

Merely asking questions [of a book] is not enough. You have to try to answer them. And although that could be done, theoretically, in your mind only, it is much easier to do it with a pencil in your hand. The pencil then becomes the sign of your alertness while you read.

It is an old saying that you have to “read between the lines” to get the most out of anything. The rules of reading are a formal way of saying this. But we want to persuade you to “write between the lines,” too. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it²
But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it.

Why is marking a book indispensable to reading it?
First, it keeps you awake—not merely conscious, but wide awake.
Second, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The person who says they knows what they think but cannot express it usually does not know what they think.

The Art of Reading, according to Adler, is that we take part in a great conversation.
I am talking to the author, but they have learnt from other masters elsewhere and are passing on their thoughts and knowledge, thus taking part in a single great conversation of humankind through the ages.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author.
Presumably she knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with her book.
But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question themselves and question the teacher. They even has to be willing to argue with the teacher, once they understand what the teacher is saying.
Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay them

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own
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I’m not particularly religious about using them all, because I’ve already been using something similar (a subset) all my life

There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here are some devices that can be used:

UNDERLINING—of major points; of important or forceful statements.
VERTICAL LINES AT THE MARGIN—to emphasize a statement already underlined or to point to a passage too long to be underlined.
STAR, ASTERISK, OR OTHER DOODAD AT THE MARGIN—to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or dozen most important statements or passages in the book. You may want to fold a corner of each page on which you make such marks or place a slip of paper between the pages. In either case, you will be able to take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it to the indicated page, refresh your recollection.
NUMBERS IN THE MARGIN—to indicate a sequence of points made by the author in developing an argument.
NUMBERS OF OTHER PAGES IN THE MARGIN—to indicate where else in the book the author makes the same points, or points relevant to or in contradiction of those here marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together. Many readers use the symbol “Cf ” to indicate the other page numbers; it means “compare” or “refer to.”
CIRCLING OF KEY WORDS OR PHRASES—This serves much the same function as underlining.
WRITING IN THE MARGIN, OR AT THE TOP OR BOTTOM OF THE PAGE—to record questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raises in your mind; to reduce a complicated discussion to a simple statement; to record the sequence of major points right through the book. The endpapers at the back of the book can be used to make a personal index of the author’s points in the order of their appearance.

To inveterate book-markers, the front endpapers are often the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. But that expresses only their financial ownership of the book. The front endpapers are better reserved for a record of your thinking. After finishing the book and making your personal index on the back endpapers, turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (you have already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic outline and an order of parts. That outline will be the measure of your understanding of the work; unlike a bookplate, it will express your intellectual ownership of the book.

“That outline will express your intellectual ownership of the book”
Click to embiggen

But, wait! There’s more!
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Marking up a book is all fine and dandy, but what about recording your thoughts? And questions?

Adler to the rescue again with The Three Kinds of Note-making.
Which kind you make depends upon the level at which you are reading.

1. Notes during Inspectional Reading
The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?
You should make notes concerning your answers to these questions, especially if you know that it may be days or months before you will be able to return to the book to give it an analytical reading. (These kind of notes have served me really well, since I tend to keep the book down and then come back to it after a while)
Notes at this stage, primarily concern the structure of the book, and not its substance—at least not in detail.
The best place to make such notes is on the contents page, or perhaps on the title page, which are otherwise unused in the scheme we have outlined above.

2. Notes during Analytical Reading
In the course of an inspectional reading, especially of a long and difficult book, you may attain some insights into the author’s ideas about his subject matter. Often, however, you will not; and certainly you should put off making any judgment of the accuracy or truth of the statements until you have read the book more carefully.
Then, during an analytical reading, you will need to give answers to questions about the truth and significance of the book. The notes you make at this level of reading are, therefore, not structural but conceptual. They concern the author’s concepts, and also your own, as they have been deepened or broadened by your reading of the book.

3. Notes during Syntopical Reading
There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion—the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. We prefer to call such notes dialectical.
Since they are made concerning several books, not just one, they often have to be made on a separate sheet (or sheets) of paper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied—an order of statements and questions about a single subject matter.

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P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit.

edited and paraphrased ↩︎
emphasis, mine ↩︎

How to Read a Book: 005, On Reading Speed

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

This has never been a bugbear for me. A lifetime of reading has led me to read at a fairly fast clip. But Adler puts into specific words, what it is that I actually, subconsciously do. This will help me advise my younger friends, when I used to struggle earlier, with a “Just keep at it”

Below followeth Adler’s advice …

Great speed in reading is a dubious achievement; it is of value only if what you have to read is not really worth reading. A better formula is this:
Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension. In any event, the speed at which they read, be it fast or slow, is but a fractional part of most people’s problem with reading

The ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds — and to know when the different speeds are appropriate.

So if that is the ideal, how do we go about increasing our speed if we are slow / irregular? Adles has an observation and a suggestion, that’ll take us most of the way there.

The eyes of young or untrained readers “fixate” as many as five or six times in the course of each line that is read. (The eye is blind while it moves; it can only see when it stops.) Thus single words or at the most two-word or three-word phrases are being read at a time, in jumps across the line. Even worse than that, the eyes of incompetent readers regress as often as once every two or three lines—that is, they return to phrases or sentences previously read.

Place your thumb and first two fingers together. Sweep this “pointer” across a line of type, a little faster than it is comfortable for your eyes to move. Force yourself to keep up with your hand. You will very soon be able to read the words as you follow your hand. Keep practicing this, and keep increasing the speed at which your hand moves, and before you know it you will have doubled or trebled your reading speed.

With a caveat however …

What exactly have you gained if you increase your reading speed significantly? It is true that you have saved time—but what about comprehension? Has that also increased, or has it suffered in the process?
It is worth emphasizing, therefore, that it is precisely comprehension in reading that this book seeks to improve. You cannot comprehend a book without reading it analytically; analytical reading, as we have noted, is undertaken primarily for the sake of comprehension (or understanding).

How to Read a Book: 004, The Four Levels of Reading

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 02 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

This is another post, that is near verbatim¹ from the book.
Because, once again, this is reference material, that I need to come back to over and over.

The Four Levels of Reading
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They are called so, because they are cumulative.
The first level is not lost in the second, the second in the third, the third in the fourth. In fact, the fourth and highest level of reading includes all the others. It simply goes beyond them.

Level 1: Elementary Reading
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Everyboy can read at this level!
This is the most common level there is.

The first level of reading we will call Elementary Reading. In mastering this level, one learns the rudiments of the art of reading, receives basic training in reading, and acquires initial reading skills. We prefer the name elementary reading, because this level of reading is ordinarily learned in elementary school.

The child’s first encounter with reading is at this level. His problem then (and ours when we began to read) is to recognize the individual words on the page. He is merely concerned with language as it is employed by the writer. At this level of reading, the question asked of the reader is “What does the sentence say?” That could be conceived as a complex and difficult question, of course. We mean it here, however, in its simplest sense.

Level 2: Inspectional Reading
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This level I do very well, because of the anti-library.
Figuring out whether the book is worth reading or not, is a critical skill for me.
Too many books, far too little time, after all :)

The second level of reading we will call Inspectional Reading.

One way to describe this level of reading is to say that its aim is to get the most out of a book within a given time—usually a relatively short time, and always (by definition) too short a time to get out of the book everything that can be gotten.

Still another name for this level might be skimming or pre-reading. However, we do not mean the kind of skimming that is characterized by casual or random browsing through a book. Inspectional reading is the art of skimming systematically.

When reading at this level, your aim is to examine the surface of the book, to learn everything that the surface alone can teach you. That is often a good deal.

Whereas the question that is asked at the first level is “What does the sentence say?” the question typically asked at this level is “What is the book about?” That is a surface question; others of a similar nature are “What is the structure of the book?” or “What are its parts?” Upon completing an inspectional reading of a book, no matter how short the time you had to do it in, you should also be able to answer the question, “What kind of book is it—a novel, a history, a scientific treatise?”

Level 3: Analytical Reading
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This is the level at what I want to read regularly.
What I want to do, everytime I pick up a book to learn from and understand deeply.
This is what I have set out to learn from this book.
Francis Bacon once remarked that “some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.”
I want to be able to digest the books I read!

The third level of reading we will call Analytical Reading.

Analytical reading is thorough reading, complete reading, or good reading—the best reading you can do. If inspectional reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given a limited time, then analytical reading is the best and most complete reading that is possible given unlimited time.

The analytical reader must ask many, and organized, questions of what he is reading. […] analytical reading is always intensely active. On this level of reading, the reader grasps a book—the metaphor is apt—and works at it until the book becomes his own.

We also want to stress that analytical reading is hardly ever necessary if your goal in reading is simply information or entertainment. Analytical reading is preeminently for the sake of understanding.

Level 4: Syntopical Reading
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This level is one, I really doubt I’ll ever do outside of work or research or learning.
That is where I use it the most. And this level of learning is something I figured out on my own, while consulting. Tackling a specific problem in a niche domain, meant that I needed to figure out all the angles beforehand. Figuring what that world was like, and how did what I want fit into that world. Syntopical Reading is very very similar. And like Adler notes, very demanding.

The fourth and highest level of reading we will call Syntopical Reading.

Another name for this level might be comparative reading. When reading syntopically, the reader reads many books, not just one, and places them in relation to one another and to a subject about which they all revolve. But mere comparison of texts is not enough. Syntopical reading involves more. With the help of the books read, the syntopical reader is able to construct an analysis of the subject that may not be in any of the books.

It is the most complex and systematic type of reading of all. It makes very heavy demands on the reader, even if the materials he is reading are themselves relatively easy and unsophisticated.

Ok, I say verbatim, but now everything is excerpted and heavily paraphrased and put in slightly out of order. You could even say, this is a Syntopical post! ↩︎

I Need Two Copies of a Book Now

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 10:37:50 +0530

via Know Your Meme

My primary reading device is my Kobo.
For the simple reason, that I will need to buy a whole new home, for my books otherwise. The anti-library is just too large.

But as I was reading, How to Read a Book, I realise I’ll probably need a copy on the Kobo as well as a physical copy in hand, for any book that I want to read in depth.
If reading is effort, as the book suggests, then I might as well have the right tools for the right kind of effort.
Rapidly scanning through, marking things up, jotting thoughts down, and all other assorted marginalia is very easy with a physical book. Looking words up in a dictionary, copying notes in and out, and searching are very easy with the Kobo.
When it comes to writing my thoughts elsewhere or doing research, it is easy to scan through a physical book, find the relevant page, and then I am back in that mental space I was, that triggered the thought. This realisation; that books are spatial memory, is new to me (I might have been using it subconsciously all along). An e-reader cannot give me that.

So I’m going to make the best of both worlds and use both!

How to Read a Book: 003, The Four Basic Questions (A Reader Asks)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 19:13:01 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

The Four Basic Questions:
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This is the basic idea, that permeates the entire book down to its bones and colours every piece of advice Adler offers.

I’m quoting this verbatim, without any paraphrasing, because these questions are what I will be returning to time and again, in the coming days (and weeks and months and years.)

The one simple prescription for active reading.
It is: Ask questions while you read—questions that you yourself must try to answer in the course of reading.

What is the book about as a whole?
You must try to discover the leading theme of the book, and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way by subdividing it into its essential subordinate themes or topics.
What is being said in detail, and how?
You must try to discover the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitute the author’s particular message.
Is the book true, in whole or part?
You cannot answer this question until you have answered the first two. You have to know what is being said before you can decide whether it is true or not. When you understand a book, however, you are obligated, if you are reading seriously, to make up your own mind. Knowing the author’s mind is not enough.
What of it?
If the book has given you information, you must ask about its significance. Why does the author think it is important to know these things? Is it important to you to know them? And if the book has not only informed you, but also enlightened you, it is necessary to seek further enlightenment by asking what else follows, what is further implied or suggested.

How to Read a Book: 002, A Few Thoughts on Books

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Fri, 27 Jun 2025 20:22:08 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

A few thoughts on books and how long it takes me to read them, as they relate to what I learned reading this book

Reading for joy, is just that. Reading for joy! Nothing needs to come in the way of that.
Books can take as long as they need to be read. Comprehension is key. Not how many I finish.
I was wondering how so many folks read so many books “better” faster than me. The book assures me that reading books analytically, reading ideas syntopically across a swathe of books is inherently slow. I cannot read everything that way. Nor should I want to obviously. The book needs to be worthy of that kind of time and attention. To quote Adler …

A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself.
You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life.
You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable—books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

And I always worried about how I would go about reading all the great books there were, when there were so many? How would I get to them all? Adler assures me that such books are few and far between. And Having read thousands of books by now, I agree. A good book, a good Lindy book is really hard to find. The last great expository / philosophical / non fiction book I read was Antifragile close to twelve years ago. The last great fiction book, luckily was Harrow in 2020. Great books don’t come by often.
Here’s Adler again …

… if the book belongs to the highest class—the very small number of inexhaustible books—you discover on returning that the book seems to have grown with you. You see new things in it—whole sets of new things—that you did not see before. Your previous understanding of the book is not invalidated (assuming that you read it well the first time); it is just as true as it ever was, and in the same ways that it was true before. But now it is true in still other ways, too.

How can a book grow as you grow? […] what you only now begin to realize is that the book was so far above you to begin with that it has remained above you, and probably always will remain so. Since it is a really good book—a great book, as we might say—it is accessible at different levels. Your impression of increased understanding on your previous reading was not false. The book truly lifted you then. But now, even though you have become wiser and more knowledgeable, it can lift you again. And it will go on doing this until you die.

There are obviously not many books that can do this for any of us. Our estimate was that the number is considerably less than a hundred. But the number is even less than that for any given reader. Human beings differ in many ways other than in the power of their minds. They have different tastes; different things appeal more to one person than to another. You may never feel about Newton the way you feel about Shakespeare, either because you may be able to read Newton so well that you do not have to read him again, or because mathematical systems of the world just do not have all that appeal to you. Or, if they do then Newton may be one of the handful of books that are great for you, and not Shakespeare.

You should seek out the few books that can have this value for you. They are the books that will teach you the most, both about reading and about life. They are the books to which you will want to return over and over. They are the books that will help you to grow.

And suddenly it isn’t so hard any more. The path I have now before me, is to go find my small set of great books. The books I can learn from and grow old with. Oh joy!

To quote Nux, Oh, what a day! What a lovely day!

How to Read a Book: 001, Begin!

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 19:25:58 +0530

image courtesy, Simon & Schuster

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this?
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Some thoughts …

I feel like, for all my reading, whenever I come across a great book, I don’t quite get as much out of it, as I ought to. (Anthony D’Mello, Tamsyn Muir and Nassim Taleb are a few who come to mind.)
Most of my note taking has been intuitive. And then I struggle to draw insights. To add insult to injury, the struggle is unique for each book. I need a framework, to get atleast 80% of the way there, predictably, every time.

Why this book?
#

Because I like it.¹
I love the old-timey feel of the book. Yes, it is a product of its time and I really, desperately wish, they update it to become a whole lot more inclusive when it comes to a great many things. Not the least being gender. Also faith.
But for the actual lessons that it does try to teach; I resonate with the author’s voice.

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen?
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Read it.
Make notes.
Write about it in tiny bits.
Write down, thoughts, insight, stuff that strikes me, paragraphs from the book, quotes, and everything in between

Let it take as long as it does.

The biggest lesson, I took away from the book last time I read it, was that the intentional reading of a good book, takes time. I want to be able to do this with the books I like, so I’m getting the ball rolling with this one itself.

The note I wrote to myself at the beginning of the year was …

Read less, write more notes. Abandon more books.

By reading less, I meant I wanted to read good books slower and longer, which is what I hope I will do, once I get done reading this book.

“a rare phenomenon, a living classic …” is how the publisher refers to it ↩︎

How-to-Read-a-Book on Janusworx

How to Read a Book: 009, Elementary Reading, The First Level

Stages of Learning to Read #

Stages and Levels #

How to Read a Book: 008, More On the Activity and the Art of Reading

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference #

Art of Reading #

What is Reading? A couple of meanings … #

On Reading as Discovery #

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead) #

How to Read a Book: 007, Highlights from the Activity and the Art of Reading

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us … #

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s #

How to Read a Book: 006, Own Your Book

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own #

But, wait! There’s more! #

How to Read a Book: 005, On Reading Speed

How to Read a Book: 004, The Four Levels of Reading

The Four Levels of Reading #

Level 1: Elementary Reading #

Level 2: Inspectional Reading #

Level 3: Analytical Reading #

Level 4: Syntopical Reading #

I Need Two Copies of a Book Now

How to Read a Book: 003, The Four Basic Questions (A Reader Asks)

The Four Basic Questions: #

How to Read a Book: 002, A Few Thoughts on Books

How to Read a Book: 001, Begin!

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this? #

Why this book? #

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen? #

Stages of Learning to Read
#

Stages and Levels
#

Enlightenment or Sophmore(istry)? Reading serves both. It’s the reader who is the difference
#

Art of Reading
#

What is Reading? A couple of meanings …
#

On Reading as Discovery
#

On Present and Absent Teachers (Or as Munger would have put it, the eminent dead)
#

Thinking is vitally important, but the modern world does not let us …
#

On the ability to read actively & the need to make an effort to match the author’s
#

Mortimer Adler’s methods of marking up a book and making it your own
#

But, wait! There’s more!
#

The Four Levels of Reading
#

Level 1: Elementary Reading
#

Level 2: Inspectional Reading
#

Level 3: Analytical Reading
#

Level 4: Syntopical Reading
#

The Four Basic Questions:
#

Why do I need to learn how to read? What has brought me to this?
#

Why this book?
#

What’s the plan now? What do I hope will happen?
#