How to Read a Book

I'm at the Oak Ridge public library. There's a book for sale in the 50 cent rack titled, "How to Read a Book" by Mortimer Adler. It is about 400 pages long. What cruel irony. I have to know how to read this book, in order to learn how to read this book.

The kicker is, as I flip through the pages, I see the author has written this line halfway through the book: "I don't consider myself to have read many books." Great... I'm halfway to learning how to read this book, and now you confess that you're a complete fraud...

Step aside noob author! Let me teach you how you really read a book.

Method A

1. Turn the page
2. Use literacy

repeat 

 

fig 1.1 use literacy

 

Method B

1. Highlight every sentence containing a capitalized word not found at the beginning.
2. Write what you are thinking in the margins, like mm hmm, yes, and important.
3. Get a new highlighter.

repeat 

 

Method C

1. Leave the book open to any random page*
2. Claim to have read 'most of it' to anyone who asks
3. Look up what someone on the internet had to say about the book. **
4. Regurgitate whatever opinions seem most popular ***

* and go do something else.

** If you are fairly confident that no one in the room has read the book or ever will, make up whatever you want about it. If anyone calls you out, just say you got mixed up with another book just like it, and give a fake and vague author's last name, to show how well read you are.
"It was a great book by Johnson, have you read it? Ah well, it's a shame. That one was much better written."

*** then shift further discussion onto the opinions rather than the book itself.