After taking our time going through Tony Reinke’s seventh chapter on reading priorities, we are ready to move on to chapter eight, titled “How to Read a Book” – 20 Tips and Tricks for Reading Nonfiction Books”, in his new book Lit! A Christian Guide to Reading Books (Crossway 2011). Many of these tips are gleaned from the classic How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler, according to Reinke. Today I am going to select just a couple of his suggestions here – two that gave me good advice on how to read.
The first is what he calls “anticipate”:
Before you begin reading a book, determine its purpose in your life. Why are you reading this book? What makes it better than the ten thousand books you ignored? Is it part of your spiritual diet, for personal change, or just for fun? Determining clear reading priorities is critical….
Once the reading priorities are clear, then it’s time to ask specific questions. I encourage readers to write five to ten specific questions they would like the author to answer. By posing questions to a book before you begin, you establish an objective basis for why you are reading this book in the first place. As you read, those questions will make it easier to determine if the book is achieving this purpose.
Another fine tip is this: “slowly x-ray the book”:
Time to crack the cover for the first time and inhale that new book smell, or that old library smell – or, I guess, the warm flickering scentless pixels from your favorite e-reading device. Before I begin reading page 1 of a book I invest thirty to sixty minutes to ask broad structural questions. Adler writes, ‘Every book has a skeleton hidden between its covers.’ I am trying to x-ray for that skeletal structure.
First, I study the table of content, noticing how chapters build on one another. Second, I scan the book and its section headings. Third, I read the chapter summaries and even the concluding chapter (My wife does this, and it is a real pet peeve of mine! – cjt). Anything that looks like a concise summary gets read first…. Then I’m ready to begin reading the introduction.
Readers are tempted to dive right into the first pages, but it takes patience to x-ray a book. The time spent slowly inspecting a book is a rewarding investment. And this step has protected me from wasting time reading mediocre books!
Take time to x-ray for the skeleton, and take as much time as you need to do it well (pp.111-113).
