How to Read a Great Book

A great book is a book people have loved and argued about for a very long time. Some are hundreds of years old. Some are thousands! They tell of heroes and voyages, of clever questions, and of how people found out how the world works.

Great books can feel hard at first. The words may be old, and the sentences long. That is fine. You don't have to understand everything the first time. Nobody does.

• Read with a grown-up. Take turns reading aloud, a page each.
• Read a little at a time. Ten or fifteen minutes is plenty.
• Tell it back. Close the book and say what happened, in your own words.
• Ask a question. What surprised you? What would you have done?

A great book is one that is still worth reading long after it was written. It takes up questions people keep asking: what is just, what is true, how nature works, how to live. It rewards a second reading, and a third. And it has been part of a long conversation, with later writers answering, quarreling with or building on it.

The classic guide to reading such books is How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler, first published in 1940 and rewritten with Charles Van Doren in 1972. It describes reading as an active skill that can be learned, and it is known for setting out levels of reading: the elementary level of reading the words, a quick inspectional look at a whole book, the slow, careful analytical reading of one book, and syntopical reading, which compares several books on one subject. It is well worth reading in full; your library will have it. What follows is our own advice, for families.

Before you start

• Choose well. Start with a work that matches your interests: a story (Homer, Shakespeare), a short argument (Plato's Apology), or a science classic with experiments you can try (Galileo, Faraday).
• Pick a good translation. Many older translations are in the public domain and free. If one reads stiffly, try another.
• Look the book over first. Read the title page, the contents and the first and last pages of a chapter or two. Find out when it was written and what was happening then.
• Set a pace. Fifteen or twenty minutes a day goes a long way. The Harvard Classics Daily readings on this site take about that long.

While you read

• Read it through once without stopping to look up every hard word or name. Mark what puzzles you and keep going. A whole book makes sense of its parts.
• Read with a pencil. Underline key sentences, number the steps of an argument, write questions in the margin. In a library book, use sticky notes or a notebook.
• Ask the author questions. Who is speaking, and to whom? What problem is the author trying to solve? What would they say to someone who disagreed? Where do you agree, and why?
• Read aloud poems, plays and speeches. They were written to be heard.
• Tell it back. After each sitting, say or write a few sentences about what you read. This is called narration, and it is one of the best ways to remember.

After you read

• Talk about it. A book talk at dinner, with one question each, is a fine start. Give reasons, point to the page, and listen as carefully as you speak.
• Be fair before you judge. Make sure you can state the author's view in a way the author would accept. Then say where you agree or disagree.
• Keep a commonplace book. Copy out passages you want to keep. Many great readers did this.
• Come back to it. A great book read at twelve and again at forty is two different books.

Two kinds of reading. Most of what we read, we read for information: the news, a recipe, a manual. A great book asks something more of us. We read it to understand, which means following an argument we did not already know and could not have made ourselves. Adler's book makes a great deal of this difference, and it is the reason great books feel slow: understanding takes longer than collecting facts.

Reading across books. The highest level in Adler's scheme, syntopical reading, means putting several authors side by side on one question and working out where they agree and disagree. His Syntopicon, the index of ideas that fills the first two volumes of Great Books of the Western World, was built to make that kind of reading possible. Our own Great Ideas index does the same on a small scale for this ladder.

Translations. Most of the great books were written in Greek, Latin, Italian, French, German or Russian. Every translation is also an interpretation. Comparing two translations of one passage is a good way to see what the translator decided, and to get closer to the original.

Reading the old science books. Euclid, Galileo, Newton and Faraday are worth reading even though science has moved on. You see how a discovery was made, what the author had to argue against, and what the evidence looked like before anyone knew the answer. Where an old book got something wrong, the lesson on that rung says so.

Reading with children. The educator Charlotte Mason (1842–1923) built a whole way of schooling on reading good books and telling them back. Families who follow her, and many who don't, find that children can enjoy far more demanding books than we expect, as long as they hear them read well, a little at a time, and get to talk about them.