How to Read a Book | Research

Reading is not one thing. Francis Bacon knew this in 1625: “Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” Mortimer Adler systematized this intuition into four levels. The question isn’t whether to read, but how—and that depends entirely on what you want from the book.

The Four Levels of Reading

Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (1940, revised 1972 with Charles Van Doren) remains the definitive framework. The levels are cumulative—each builds on the previous.

Level 1: Elementary Reading

The foundation. Can you understand what the words mean? This is what we learn in school—decoding sentences, following narrative, basic comprehension. The question answered: “What does the sentence say?”

Most people stop here. They read words without engaging with ideas.

Level 2: Inspectional Reading

Strategic skimming to determine a book’s value before committing. Two modes:

Systematic skimming: Read the title, preface, table of contents, index. Scan key chapters. Flip through looking for pivots and conclusions. Time investment: 15-30 minutes. Question answered: “What is this book about? What kind of book is it?”

Superficial reading: Read through quickly without stopping to ponder or look things up. Get the forest before the trees. Don’t let confusion about parts prevent understanding of the whole.

Adler’s insight: “Simply skimming the introduction gives you 90% of the value” for many books—especially pop-science and business books that stretch one idea across 300 pages.

Level 3: Analytical Reading

Deep, thorough engagement with a single book. The goal is complete understanding—to grasp not just what the author says but what they mean, and whether they’re right.

Stage 1—Structural (What is the book about as a whole?):

Classify the book by kind and subject matter
State the book’s overall thesis in one or two sentences
Enumerate the major parts and outline their relationships
Define the problems the author is trying to solve

Stage 2—Interpretive (What is being said in detail?): 5. Come to terms with the author—identify key words and their meanings 6. Grasp the author’s leading propositions through key sentences 7. Know the arguments—find or construct them from sequences of sentences 8. Determine which problems the author solved and which remain

Stage 3—Critical (Is it true? What of it?): 9. Do not criticize until you understand 10. Do not disagree disputatiously 11. Respect the difference between knowledge and opinion 12. Show where the author is uninformed, misinformed, illogical, or incomplete

Adler: “You have no right to say ‘I agree,’ ‘I disagree,’ or ‘I suspend judgment’ until you can honestly say ‘I understand.’”

Level 4: Syntopical Reading

The highest level. Reading multiple books on a single subject to construct understanding beyond any single author.

The five steps:

Find the relevant passages across your sources—inspectional reading helps here
Bring authors to terms—translate their vocabularies into your own neutral terminology
Frame questions that span multiple authors—questions they may not have asked themselves
Define the issues by mapping where authors agree and disagree
Analyze the discussion to understand the shape of the controversy

The syntopical reader “tries to look at all sides and to take no sides.” The goal is not to form an opinion but to understand the full landscape of opinion.

The Danger of Reading Too Much

Schopenhauer (On Reading and Books, 1851) offers a counterpoint: “When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process.”

His warning: “The person who reads a great deal—that is to say, almost the whole day, and recreates himself by spending the intervals in thoughtless diversion, gradually loses the ability to think for himself; just as a man who is always riding at last forgets how to walk.”

Reading without reflection is consumption without digestion. Schopenhauer recommended: “Just as one spoils the stomach by overfeeding and thereby impairs the whole body, so can one overload and choke the mind by giving it too much nourishment. For the more one reads the fewer are the traces left of what one has read.”

His solution: read less, but better. Choose the best books—“the true original ancients”—and read them thoroughly, with time for reflection between sessions. A small library read deeply beats a large library skimmed.

Virginia Woolf: Reading as Sympathetic Act

Where Adler is systematic and Schopenhauer is cautionary, Virginia Woolf (How Should One Read a Book?, 1926) is empathic.

Her opening: “The only advice that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions.”

Woolf’s three stages:

Receive impressions openly: First, read with openness and sympathy. Try to understand the author’s intention. Rather than judging from outside, “stand in the dock with the criminal.”
Pass judgment: After finishing, let the book settle. Then compare your impressions to a unified whole. What did the author achieve? Where did they fall short?
Compare to the masters: Place the work against the great works in its genre. Use imagination, insight, and learning to situate it.

The rhythm matters: receptivity first, criticism second. “Do not dictate to your author; try to become him.”

Active Reading: The Core Techniques

Reading is not watching—it requires work. As Adler puts it: “Reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words.”

Marginalia and Annotation

Mortimer Adler’s marking system:

Underline major points
Vertical lines in margins for longer important passages
Asterisks for key statements
Numbers for sequences of points
Cross-references to related pages
Circle key words/phrases
Write questions and responses in margins

Tim Parks argues marginalia is one thing that “might best improve the lot of mankind.” The conversation with the text—where you agree, disagree, wonder—transforms passive reading into active thinking.

The SQ3R Method

Francis P. Robinson’s 1941 framework for textbook reading:

Survey: Skim headings, bolded text, chapter summaries (5-10 minutes)
Question: Turn headings into questions (“A Limited Partnership” → “What is a limited partnership?”)
Read: Read actively, seeking answers to your questions
Recite: After each section, recite the key points in your own words
Review: Within 24 hours, review the material for retention

The method works better for expository nonfiction than for fiction or philosophy, where structure is less predictable.

Note-Taking Systems

Ryan Holiday’s Notecard Method

Learned from Robert Greene, refined over years:

Read actively: Underline passages, write marginalia, flag pages with Post-its
Wait before transcribing: Let weeks pass—some “important” passages won’t seem important anymore
Create cards: Write insights on 4×6 notecards with a theme/category at top
Store by theme: Organize cards by topic, not by book—this is the key insight

The system prioritizes retrieval over storage. You’re not archiving—you’re building a tool for thinking and writing.

The Zettelkasten (Niklas Luhmann)

German sociologist Luhmann published 70 books and 400+ articles, crediting his “slip-box” (Zettelkasten) of 90,000+ index cards.

Two slip-boxes:

Bibliographic box: Citations and brief content notes
Main box: Ideas and theories—the thinking tool

Three note types (per Sönke Ahrens’ How to Take Smart Notes):

Fleeting notes: Quick captures, unstructured, processed within days or discarded
Literature notes: Brief, selective, in your own words—one side for citation, other for content
Permanent notes: Polished thoughts that stand alone, linked to other notes

The system works through connection, not categorization. Luhmann didn’t file notes by topic—he assigned fixed numbers and linked related ideas across domains. “I always read with an eye towards possible connections in the slip-box.”

The key question shifts from “Where should I file this?” to “In what context will I want to find this again?”

Memory and Retention

The problem: “In very short order we lose something like 70 percent of what we’ve just heard or read” (Make It Stick).

Active Recall

The testing effect: retrieving information strengthens memory far more than re-reading. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found students who practiced retrieval retained 80% after a week versus 34% for passive study.

Practical techniques:

Close the book and write what you remember
Use flashcards (don’t flip too soon)
Explain what you learned out loud, as if teaching someone
Quiz yourself before checking

Spaced Repetition

Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve shows memory decays exponentially—unless you review at strategic intervals.

The pattern: review after 1 day, then 3 days, then 7 days, then monthly. Each review strengthens the memory and resets the decay curve.

Tools like Anki, Readwise, and RemNote automate the scheduling. The principle: space your encounters with important ideas.

Combined with active recall, spaced repetition can increase retention 2-3x compared to traditional study methods.

Deep Reading vs. Skimming

Maryanne Wolf (Reader, Come Home) warns that digital reading is rewiring our brains for skimming: “We are advantaging speed and disadvantaging the time-consuming, sophisticated deep reading processes.”

The cost of skimming: “When we skim, we simply do not have enough cerebral time to connect the information we read to all the more sophisticated, time-consuming processes necessary for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking, reflection and insight.”

More than 80% of college educators report a “shallowing” effect from screen reading on their students’ comprehension.

Wolf’s solution: become “biliterate”—capable of both modes. Practice slow, sustained reading on paper. Protect time for books that deserve deep engagement. “During the process, my world slowed down—just a little—as I recovered my lost way of reading.”

The slow reading movement advocates intentional deceleration: re-read difficult passages, sit with ambiguity, allow time for reflection between sessions.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: Different Modes

The techniques differ by purpose.

For nonfiction:

Focus on structure: headings, arguments, evidence
Identify main claims and supporting logic
Summarize sections in your own words
Connect to existing knowledge

For fiction:

Visualize scenes (strengthens memory through imagery)
Track themes, symbols, character arcs
Read more slowly to engage emotionally
The “meaning” emerges through experience, not extraction

Fiction benefits from emotional encoding—memories tied to feelings persist longer. Don’t optimize fiction reading for retention; optimize for depth of experience.

Research shows diverse reading (both fiction and nonfiction) correlates with higher reading achievement, likely due to broader vocabulary and conceptual exposure.

Pierre Bayard’s Provocation

In How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (2007), literature professor Pierre Bayard argues that “not having read a book need not be an impediment to having an interesting conversation about it.”

His serious point beneath the wit: what matters is a book’s position in the “collective library”—the web of relationships between texts. Knowing how a book relates to other works, what conversations it participates in, may matter more than remembering its details.

Bayard’s notation system for non-reading:

UB: book unknown to me
SB: book I have skimmed
HB: book I have heard about
FB: book I have forgotten

We are all non-readers in some sense. Memory fades. What persists is the shape of understanding—the structural knowledge of how ideas connect.

A Practical Synthesis

Before reading:

Why am I reading this? (Entertainment? Information? Understanding? Mastery?)
Is this worth analytical reading, or will inspectional reading suffice?
How does this connect to what I already know?

While reading:

Mark passages that strike you (don’t over-highlight)
Write marginalia: questions, reactions, connections
Pause at the end of sections to recite key points

After reading:

Wait before taking permanent notes
Write what you remember without looking
Create notes in your own words, organized by theme
Connect to existing notes and ideas
Review at spaced intervals

For mastery (syntopical reading):

Read multiple sources on the same topic
Create your own terminology to bridge authors
Map agreements and disagreements
Form your own questions that span the sources

The goal is not to finish books. It’s to build understanding. Sometimes that means reading slowly and thoroughly. Sometimes it means skimming strategically. Always it means thinking.

Key Texts

Foundational:

How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren — the systematic framework
On Reading and Books by Arthur Schopenhauer — the case for reading less, better

On Writing and Thinking:

How Should One Read a Book? by Virginia Woolf — reading as empathic act
How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens — modern Zettelkasten practice

On Memory and the Brain:

Reader, Come Home by Maryanne Wolf — neuroscience of reading in digital age
Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel — science of learning and retention

Practical Systems: