The 20th Annual Book Report Competition For

Secondary School Students

2nd Runner Up of English Senior Section

School: St. Paul’s Convent School

Student Name : Xin Fang

Title: How to Read a Book

A book that has stood the test of time is not to be taken lightly. How to Read a Book not only is a book that has been standing tall and firm for 65 years, it also releases the power locked inside books.

How to Read a Book left me with the impression that reading is a four-storey tower. The four storeys are elementary reading, inspectional reading, analytical reading and comparative reading. The storeys have to be climbed one by one. Obviously, the higher you climb, the more you will see. However, what transports you up a storey is not a lift, but staircases that you have to climb by yourself. Reaching the final storey will certainly leave you breathless, but the view from this storey is absolutely breathtaking. How to Read a Book is a guidebook that tells you how to arrive at each storey.

According to How to Read a Book, elementary reading is the level in which one acquires initial reading skills—recognizing the individual words on the page and understanding what the sentence means in its simplest sense. Most of us have already passed this storey in primary school.

Inspectional reading consists of two steps.The first step is to pre-read the book by studying the title page, preface, table of contents, and a chapter or two. The aim of this step is to learn everything that the surface of the book alone can teach you. The second step is to read the entire book superficially without bothering whether you understand it or not—‘read it through without ever stopping to look up or ponder the things you do not understand right away’. Believe it or not, by skipping the things you do not understand in the first reading, you will have a better chance of understanding it on a second reading because by understanding the big points the author made in the first reading, it will be easier to understand the finer points in the second reading. If you insisted on understanding every page before going to the next, you will fall into the trap of ‘missing the forest for the trees’.

As for analytical reading, there are eight rules to it:

• You must know what kind of book you are reading and you should know this as early as possible. This can be achieved by applying the skills of inspectional reading.
• State the unity of the whole book in a single sentence, or at most a few sentences. This rule is a test of your understanding—if you cannot state the author’s message concisely in your own words, than you have not truly understand the book.
• Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. Only by grasping the organization of its parts can you know the whole comprehensively. How is this done? By cutting the piece of work into smaller pieces: from sections to chapters and to paragraphs, and then working out the main theme of each part.
• Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve.
• Come to terms with the author by interpreting his key words. Since words may have multiple meanings, it is important that the reader and the author have the same interpretation of the words, so as to reduce ambiguities during communication. This is done by first locating the key word and then analyzing its meaning in context.
• Grasp the author’s leading propositions by dealing with his most important sentences. This rule is closely related to rule no. 6—if you can find the keyword, then the sentence with that keyword is most probably the key sentence.
• Knowing the author’s arguments. This can be done by putting numbers in the margin to indicate the places where the sentences occur that should be tied together in a sequence.
• Determine which of his problems the author has solved, and which he has not.

Comparative reading is the final and highest storey in the reading tower. It is the storey in which you read different works on the same subject, as objectively as possible, without holding criticism of any of the books until you have understood the different perspectives presented in the books. The first step is, of course, to create a tentative bibliography of your subject. Then bring the authors to terms by constructing a neutral terminology of the subject that the majority of the authors can be interpreted as employing. The third step is to define the issues, both major and minor ones, by ranging the opposing answers of authors to the various questions on one side of an issue or another. Lastly, analyze the discussion by ordering the questions and issues in such a way as to throw maximum light on the subject.

How to Read a Book echoes the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson—‘In reading, there is a sort of half and half mixture. The book must be good, but the reader must also be active.’ This book shows concretely how the reader can become actively involved in the reading process. We all know asking questions is a good way of sinking your teeth into a book; but what questions should we ask? How to Read a Book suggests the four basic questions you should ponder on before and after you read the book. They are as follows:

• What is the book about as a whole?
• What is being said in detail, and how?
• Is the book true, in whole or part?
• What of it?

The first question leads to the discovery of the leading theme of the book and how the author develops this theme in an orderly way, while the second question leads to the discovery of the main ideas, assertions, and arguments that constitutes the author’s particular message. The third question can only be answered when the first two have been answered, then reader must decide for himself whether the book is true. The last question deals with why and in what way is the book significant. Asking questions is not the end the story, the aim is to answer them as you flip through the book.

Mark Twain once said ‘The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.’ I would like to take his observation further—the man who does not understand good books has no advantage over the man who can’t read them.’ Throughout the ten odd years of my reading, the number of good books I have read goes by the dozen, but the number of good books that I understood is a mere handful. Why is that? I thought that my lack of understanding was because I was too young. But I am 18 now; my brain should be sufficiently developed, how is it then that quite often I still cannot comprehend the author’s message?

Thanks to this book, I have come to realize that my lack of understanding stems largely from my not reading actively as well as swallowing the book without maintaining a reflective and enquiring stance during the reading process. So what exactly is active reading? Briefly, active reading is the self-activated process of bombarding the author with questions and holding an imaginative discussion with the author. For one thing, asking questions is certainly a good way of keeping the discussion going because it is a way of responding to the author’s ideas.

An active and quick mind is only one of the qualities of a good reader; he or she should also have the eye of a detective, Mortimer J. Adler pointed out. I do not have the eye of a detective; in fact I have the habit of turning a blind eye to the content page and the introduction. This habit, according to How to Read a Book, is fatal to the understanding of a book.

Quite obviously, the content page acts as a `map’ that the authors had spent considerable time creating. Overlooking the content page not only wastes their efforts, shows a lack of reading skill, but also prevents the reader from getting an overview of the entire scope of the book.Without the content page, it gets so much more difficult to see the grand scheme of things.Likewise, the introduction is centrally important because it is a statement of the fundamental considerations involved in the production of the book, such as the aim, the theme and the rationale for the organization of the book. Some authors even provide suggestions on how to read their books more efficiently.

In any topography, signposts are put up to guide newcomers. In books, signposts come in many forms. The title of the book is the most conspicuous signpost, especially those of non-fiction.Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the English Stage, together with the Sense of antiquity upon this Argument is a perfect example of how much a title can tell its readers about the book. To draw the reader’s attention to key words, some writers also use italics or bold type to highlight the key words, and some writers go even further by, for instance, defining the meaning of the key words

Another aspect of reading that had never crossed my mind before I read How to Read a Book is that different genres require different reading techniques, just as you would treat people in different ways according to their personalities and cultural backgrounds. Take expository literature and imaginative literature as an example. Expository books aim at conveying knowledge; therefore, readers need to use their power of judgment and reasoning to decide for themselves whether the author’s proposition is correct or not. Imaginative literature aims at communicating an experience, one that readers can have or share only by reading. Of course, this does not mean that readers do not need imagination for expository literature, or that they do not need judgment when reading imaginative literature, it is just a matter of emphasis. Due to the difference in purpose of these two kinds of writing, the role of the reader also differs. For expository works, the reader should be like an eagle, always alert and ready to catch ideas. However, readers of imaginative literature should be like sponges that allow the authors’ passion to filter through them. In How to Read a Book, the methods involved in reading expository literature such as philosophy, science, and mathematics, as well as imaginative literature such as poems and plays, are examined in great detail.

‘Knowledge itself is power’, said the British philosopher Francis Bacon. Yes, knowledge is embedded inside books and their power can be extracted only by using the right way. And there is no book like How to Read a Book that can provide you with a comprehensive way of turning the power of words into your own intellectual power.