I'd like to start taking some notes on books I read for this blog (I mean den), on the off chance that someone will find them useful. And what better book to begin with than How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler?

Unfortunately, this entry also happens to be an experiment in combatting insomnia, and the experiment is rapidly succeeding. I'll get what I can for now.

There are piles of books on how to read books. I think I read this one because when I flipped it open, he was talking about Aristotle or Aquinas, or probably both. Also, you can open to any page and immediately get a crisp, didactic fellow; it doesn't take long to see why he likes Aristotle.

It's been a few days since I finished it, and I have yet to return and review (I'm attempting this major new habit, for reasons which will eventually be explained), but there are at least two tremendous insights in this book.

1. Dive into the index.
2. A book doesn't stretch your understanding unless you don't understand it the first time through.

Since even one such major insight is coming to seem above par for the average book, I'm quite pleased.

Dive into the index.

Adler presents a somewhat typical "preview" method, which includes the table of contents and the first and last chapter. If you don't have the habit of reading (not skimming) the table of contents, that itself can change your whole outlook of a book. Instead of dripping it word by word into your system, as from an IV, you soar at once over the whole sea, getting the lay of the coasts, the coves, the treacherous reefs.

But Adler takes it a step further; the index. If the table of contents is a birds-eye view, the index is an enchanted ball pit. I don't think Chuck E. Cheese had come on the scene yet when this book was written (though this was the revised edition); if it had, I'm sure Adler would have seized the metaphor. Even after making an index, I had never stopped to think what a brilliant pile of jewels is carefully stashed in a book's back room; you can dive right in and swim about through a jumble of all the book's main ideas. You can touch any enchanted word, and be carried right into the thick of the book.

In the past, I'd seen indexes as purely utilitarian, only consulting them when I already (thought) I knew what I wanted, grumpily sifting through the rainbow to find my particular dented yellow ball. Now, Adler suggests reading the thing, perusing it, noting which words have oodles of references; in short, swimming about.

Or again, perhaps the index is a sort of "Wood between the Worlds," as in the Magician's Nephew, or even a world of magic doorways like in Monsters, Inc.

Freed from the constraints of conventional prose, the index is almost solid idea; few prepositions, no articles or adverbs, no mitigating phrases. Try to read and visualize even one page of an index. You'll find yourself flying all over your mental landscape.

No substitute for reading the book, of course. But the relationships that leap into view may not even have been sensed by the author. You really can feel that you're diving, that real things crowd and squirm and wiggle about you like fish in the sea.

Read books you don't understand.

Adler reserved his enthusiasm for great books; in fact, he helped edit the Brittannica edition of "Great Books of the Western World," which still graces many a library shelf. Up to now, the series has seemed sufficiently cumbersome and intimidating to ward me away, although I do think that even as a child I liked the variation in the binding color scheme (so unlike an encyclopedia). I've read some of the authors, but avoided that edition. Now perhaps I'll check it out.

Adler thinks that if you understand a book too well on your first read, it doesn't have much new understanding to give you. You can always find new information, but the book that will really knock you over is the one that stretches your very understanding of the world. And, obvious as this ought to have been to me, your understanding can only be stretched if at first it doesn't reach.

This opens whole new vistas of actually reading some of the more intimidating names. Not only might I not mind those initial sensations of inertia and despair as the air thickens and grows dense; I might begin to welcome them. The usual signs of panic might become signs of promise. In this direction likes an uncharted cavern; I can tell by the closeness of the air.

The Syntopicon

Sleep is coming for me, and I'll have more to say on this soon, I hope. I'd like to summarize his techniques (so I can use them myself), and I'd also like to peruse his Syntopicon, volumes 2 and 3 of the Great Book state which were a nearly epic attempt to categorize and index over a hundred main ideas throughout the Great Books set. Adler wanted you to be able to compare quickly what was said by, say, Aquinas and Freud, on, say, the subject of love.

At first glance, this seems like a job for The Internet, but I'm not so sure. The Wikipedia article on the Syntopicon currently includes the main ideas, each of which is linked (in a slightly self-congratulatory fashion) to that idea's page on Wikipedia. You can judge for yourself whether the current Wikipedia page on any of these topics is comparable to a hundred passages or so from the "great writers", even if you do feel compelled to keep them at bay in quotation marks.

On the flip side, the idea of cross-referencing all these ideas in English translation is somewhat depressing. I say that as a college-educated monolinguist, still trudging my native slopes while the children of illegal immigrants gleefully navigate multiple worlds. Call me a wannabe philologist, but if they were going to spend all that money, Homer should have been in Greek. Maybe I'd learn it.

Speaking of money, that Wikipedia article has a fascinating (and hopefully true) account of just how expensive it was to cross-reference all these Great Books. Today, the two volumes of the Syntopicon aren't even on the shelf at the Purdue library; the rest of the Great Books series is there, but you have to go to the repository for the Syntopicon.

I have to actually read the thing a bit before praising it too much. But the idea is exciting. And the name sounds awfully cool. And the thought of multiple people getting paid for multiple years to read these books makes me wish they were releasing a revised edition.

On the other hand, it only really works if it piques you into reading at least some of the books in full. Otherwise you're depending on Adler & Co. not to have missed anything.

Reading techniques

Getting back to the actual book I did read, I also liked the various techniques Adler presented for reading. But through the wiki-like magic of the den, I will leave this tantalizing information for a future revision. (Though you can start here if you're impatient.) Good night.

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