How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading (23 page)

Test yourself in this way when you are not quite sure whether you have grasped a book. Take Aristotle's discussion of virtue in the Ethics, for example. He says over and over that virtue is a mean between the extremes of defect and excess. He gives some concrete examples; can you supply others? If so, you have understood his general point. If not, you should go back and read his discussion again.

Other Books as Extrinsic Aids to Reading

We will have more to say later about syntopical reading, where more than one book is read on a single subject. For the moment, we want to say a few things about the desirability of reading other books as extrinsic aids to the reading of a particular work.

Our advice applies particularly to the reading of so-called great books. The enthusiasm with which people embark on a course of reading great books often gives way, fairly soon, to a feeling of hopeless inadequacy. One reason, of course, is that many readers do not know how to read a single book very well. But that is not all. There is another reason: namely, that they think they should be able to understand the first book they pick up, without having read the others to which it is closely related. They may try to read The Federalist Papers without having first read the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Or they may try all these without having read Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws, Rousseau's The Social Contract, and Locke's second treatise Of Civil Government.

Not only are many of the great books related, but also they were written in a certain order that should not be ignored.

A later writer has been influenced by an earlier one. If you read the earlier writer first, he may help you to understand the later one. Reading related books in relation to one another and in an order that renders the later ones more intelligible is a basic common-sense maxim of extrinsic reading.

The utility of this kind of extrinsic reading is simply an extension of the value of context in reading a book by itself.

We have seen how the context must be used to interpret words and sentences to find terms and propositions. Just as the whole book is the context for any of its parts, so related books provide an even larger context that helps you interpret the book you are reading.

It has often been observed that the great books are involved in a prolonged conversation. The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read. As readers, they carried on a conversation with other authors, just as each of us carries on a conversation with the books we read, though we may not write other books.

To join this conversation, we must read the great books in relation to one another, and in an order that somehow respects chronology. The conversation of the books takes place in time.

Time is of the essence here and should not be disregarded. The books can be read from the present into the past or from the past into the present. Though the order from past to present has certain advantages through being more natural, the fact of chronology can be observed in either way.

It should be noted, incidentally, that the need to read books in relation to one another applies more to history and philosophy than to science and fiction. It is most important in the case of philosophy, because philosophers are great readers of each other. It is probably least important in the case of novels or plays, which, if they are really good, can be read in isolation, although of course the literary critic will not want to confine himself to doing so.

How to Use Commentaries and Abstracts

A third category of extrinsic aids to reading includes commentaries and abstracts. The thing to emphasize here is that such works should be used wisely, which is to say sparingly.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that commentators are not always right in their comments on a book. Sometimes, of course, their works are enormously useful, but this is true less often than one could wish. The handbooks and manuals that are widely available in college bookstores and in stores frequented by high school students are often particularly misleading. These works purport to tell the student everything he has to know about a book that has been assigned by one of his teachers, but they are sometimes woefully wrong in their interpretations, and besides, as a practical matter, they irritate some teachers and professors.

In defense of handbooks, it must be conceded that they are often invaluable for passing examinations. Furthermore, to balance the fact that some teachers are irritated by the errors of handbooks, other teachers use them themselves in their teaching.

The second reason for using commentaries sparingly is that, even if they are right, they may not be exhaustive. That is, you may be able to discover important meanings in a book that the author of a commentary about it has not discovered.

Reading a commentary, particularly one that seems very selfassured, thus tends to limit your understanding of a book, even if your understanding, as far as it goes, is correct.

Hence, there is one piece of advice that we want to give you about using commentaries. Indeed, this comes close to being a basic maxim of extrinsic reading. Whereas it is one of the rules of intrinsic reading that you should read an author's preface and introduction before reading his book, the rule in the case of extrinsic reading is that you should not read a commentary by someone else until after you have read the book. This applies particularly to scholarly and critical introductions. They are properly used only if you do your best to read the book first, and then and only then apply to them for answers to questions that still puzzle you. If you read them first they are likely to distort your reading of the book. You will tend to see only the points made by the scholar or critic, and fail to see other points that may be just as important.

There is considerable pleasure associated with the reading of such introductions when it is done in this way. You have read the book and understood it. The writer of the introduction has also read it, perhaps many times, and has his own understanding of it. You approach him, therefore, on essentially equal terms. If you read his introduction before reading the book, however, you are at his mercy.

Heeding this rule, that commentaries should be read after you have read the book that they expound and not before, applies also to handbooks. Such works cannot hurt you if you have already read the book and know where the handbook is wrong, if it is. But if you depend wholly on the handbook, and never read the original book, you may be in bad trouble.

And there is this further point. If you get into the habit of depending on commentaries and handbooks, you will be totally lost if you cannot find one. You may be able to understand a particular book with the help of a commentary, but in general you will be a worse reader.

The rule of extrinsic reading given here applies also to abstracts and plot digests. They are useful in two connections, but in those two only. First, they can help to jog your memory of a book's contents, if you have already read it. Ideally, you made such an abstract yourself, in reading the book analytically, but if you have not done so, an abstract or digest can be an important aid. Second, abstracts are useful when you are engaged in syntopical reading, and wish to know whether a certain work is likely to be germane to your project. An abstract can never replace the reading of a book, but it can sometimes tell you whether you want or need to read the book or not.

How to Use Reference Books

There are many kinds of reference books. In the following section we will confine ourselves mainly to the two most used kinds, dictionaries and encyclopedias. However, many of the things we will have to say apply to other kinds of reference books as well.

It is not always realized, yet it is nevertheless true, that a good deal of knowledge is required before you can use a reference book well. Specifically, four kinds of knowledge are required. Thus a reference book is an antidote to ignorance in only a limited way. It cannot cure total ignorance. It cannot do your thinking for you.

To use a reference book well, you must, first, have some idea, however vague it may be, of what you want to know.

Your ignorance must be like a circle of darkness surrounded by light. You want to bring light-to the dark circle. You cannot do that unless light surrounds the darkness. Another way to say this is that you must be able to ask a reference book an intelligible question. It will be no help to you if you are wandering, lost, in a fog of ignorance.

Second, you must know where to find out what you want to know. You must know what kind of question you are asking, and which kinds of reference books answer that kind of question. There is no reference book that answers all questions; all such works are specialists, as it were. Practically, this comes down to the fact that you must have a fair overall knowledge of all of the major types of reference books before you can use any one type effectively.

There is a third, and correlative, kind of knowledge that is required before a reference book can be useful to you. You must know how the particular work is organized. It will do you no good to know what you want to know, and to know the kind of reference book to use, if you do not know how to use the particular work. Thus there is an art of reading reference books, just as there is an art to reading anything else.

There is a correlative art to making reference books, by the way. The author or compiler should know what kind of information readers will seek, and arrange his book to fit their needs. He may not always be able to anticipate these, however, which is why the rule that you should read the introduction and preface to a book before reading the book itself applies particularly here. Do not try to use a reference book before getting the editor's advice on how to use it.

Of course, not all kinds of questions can be answered by reference books. You will not find in any reference book the answers to the three questions that God asks the angel in Tolstoy's story, What Men Live By-namely, "What dwells in man?" "What is not given to man?" and "What do men live by?" Nor will you find the answers to another question that is also used as the title of a Tolstoy story: "How much land does a man need?" And there are many such questions. Reference books are only useful when you know which kinds of questions can be answered by them, and which cannot. This comes down to knowing the sorts of things that men generally agree on. Only those things about which men generally and conventionally agree are to be found in reference books. Unsupported opinions have no business there, though they sometimes creep in.

We agree that it is possible to know when a man was born, when he died, and facts about similar matters. We agree that it is possible to define words and things, and that it is possible to sketch the history of almost anything. We do not agree on moral questions or on questions about the future, and so these sorts of things are not to be found in reference books.

We assume in our time that the physical world is orderable, and thus almost everything about it is to be found in reference books. This was not always so; as a result, the history of reference books is interesting in itself, for it can tell us much about changes in men's opinions as to what is knowable.

As you can see, we have just been suggesting that there is a fourth requirement for the intelligent use of reference books. You must know what you want to know; you must know in what reference work to find it; you must know how to find it in the reference work; and you must know that it is considered knowable by the authors or compilers of the book.

All this indicates that you must know a good deal before you can use a work of reference. Reference books are useless to people who know nothing. They are not guides to the perplexed.

How to Use a Dictionary

As a reference book, the dictionary is subject to all the considerations outlined above. But the dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time.

Dictionaries are full of arcane knowledge and witty oddments. Over and above that, of course, they have their more sober employments. To make the most of these, one has to know how to read the special kind of book a dictionary is.

Santayana's remark about the Greeks-that they were the only uneducated people in European history-has a double significance. The masses were, of course, uneducated, but even the learned few-the leisure class-were not educated in the sense that they had to sit at the feet of foreign masters. Education, in that sense, begins with the Romans, who went to school to Greek pedagogues, and became cultivated through contact with the Greek culture they had conquered.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the first dictionaries were glossaries of Homeric words, intended to help Romans read the Iliad and Odyssey as well as other Greek literature employing the "archaic" Homeric vocabulary.. In the same way, many of us today need a glossary to read Shakespeare, or if not Shakespeare, Chaucer.

There were dictionaries in the Middle Ages, but they were usually encyclopedias of worldly knowledge comprised of discussions of the most important technical terms employed in learned discourse. There were foreign-language dictionaries in the Renaissance (both Greek and Latin) , made necessary by the fact that the works that dominated the education of the period were in the ancient languages. Even when the so-called vulgar tongues-Italian, French, English-gradually replaced Latin as the language of learning, the pursuit of learning was still the privilege of the few. Under such circumstances, dictionaries were intended for a limited audience, mainly as an aid to reading and writing worthy literature.

Thus we see that from the beginning the educational motive dominated the making of dictionaries, although there was also an interest in preserving the purity and order of the language. As contrasted with the latter purpose, the Oxford English Dictionary (known familiarly as the OED) , begun in 1857, was a new departure, in that it did not try to dictate usage but instead to present an accurate historical record of every type of usage-the worst as well as the best, taken from popular as well as elegant writing. But this conflict between the lexicographer as self-appointed arbiter and the lexicographer as historian can be regarded as a side-issue, for the dictionary, however constructed, is primarily an educational instrument.