Quotes about Reading

Remember Bacon's recommendation to the reader: "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Every book should be read no more slowly than it deserves, and no more quickly than you can read it with satisfaction and comprehension.

In tackling a difficult book for the first time, read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away.

One constant is that, to achieve all the purposes of reading, the desideratum must be the ability to read different things at different—appropriate—speeds, not everything at the greatest possible speed. As Pascal observed three hundred years ago, "When we read too fast or too slowly, we understand nothing." Since

STEP 5 IN SYNTOPICAL READING: ANALYZING THE DISCUSSION

4. If the book is a new one with a dust jacket, READ THE PUBLISHER'S BLURB.

Many persons believe that they know how to read because they read at different speeds. But they pause and go slow over the wrong sentences. They pause over the sentences that interest them rather than the ones that puzzle them.

6. Finally, TURN THE PAGES, DIPPING IN HERE AND THERE, READING A PARAGRAPH OR TWO, SOMETIMES SEVERAL PAGES IN SEQUENCE, NEVER MORE THAN THAT.

The questions answered by inspectional reading are: first, what kind of book is it? second, what is it about as a whole? and third, what is the structural order of the work whereby the author develops his conception or understanding of that general subject matter?

Even a cursory perusal reveals a very great range of reference. There is hardly a single human action that has not been called—in one way or another—an act of love. Nor is the range confined to the human sphere. If you proceed far enough in your reading, you will find that love has been attributed to almost everything in the universe; that is, everything that exists has been said by someone either to love or to be loved—or both.

Francis Bacon once remarked that "some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Reading a book analytically is chewing and digesting it.

The year after How to Read a Book was published, a parody of it appeared under the title How to Read Two Books; and Professor I. A. Richards wrote a serious treatise entitled How to Read a Page.