Neil Hopcroft

[1972 edition, audiobook]

How to Read a Book by Mortimer J Adler is the work of a heretic. But I’ll come back to that later.

There are a number of levels of reading described by this book, elemental reading that most of us learn at school, through to syntopical reading, a skill for obtaining wisdom from the reading of multiple books at the same time. Most of the book concerns itself with analytical reading, during which he suggests you ask yourself a number of questions:

• What is this book about?
• Is it true?
• What of it?

In order to prepare yourself to answer these questions, you need to make some notes. This is where the heresy comes in, the notes should be made in the book itself. Either inside the cover sheets, or in the margins near the point they are highlighting. These notes should be personal, they are your understanding and for you to come back and understand again later. Marginalia.

He suggests there should be several phases to reading, an initial structural stage, where you get the feel of the book, reading the table of contents and skimming through the chapters. Then an interpretive stage during which you read and make notes on anything that seems important. Finally followed by a critical stage where you critique the book based on your notes and are elevated to the level of understanding of the writer.

There are some specific suggestions for various types of books, scientific books often lend themselves to this depth of reading while poetry much less so, though you can perform some mental gymnastics to interpret poems in this way.

I am currently reading Noise by Daniel Kahneman which is a scientific book written with this kind of reading style in mind – each chapter has a brief explanation before and a few important quotes after, removing the need for most people to make their own marginalia.

Finally there is a list of significant works that would yield to the suggested approaches to reading them.

While I have rarely seen this kind of reading in the wild, Piercarlo being a glaring exception walking the line between making notes and not marking the books by extensive use of post-it notes, I can understand that it would be a great way to get good information out of a book. You don’t see books with these kinds of notes in the second hand market because the notes are so personal, they have no meaning and a negative value to anyone else, making the book spoiled not augmented.

There are very few books I can think of that warrant this depth of attention, especially now that it is so much easier to write and publish books than it was when this guidance was written, but also because I feel I get more from a new book than I do from spending more time with one I know now. A second reading often yields much detail missed on the first, but to spend the time making notes in this way a book would have to be groundbreaking.

[Paperback, read aloud to Adelle]

Eastern Horizons, Hitchhiking the Silk Road by Levison Wood (also available at archive.org).

A history graduate sets out to hitchhike the Silk Road on a shoestring budget, and shares his adventures. After a false start getting as far as the Russian border with a friend he returns alone to make the whole journey.

He starts out sleeping rough in some terrible choices of location, then gains confidence and gets in his stride for the adventure.

Along the way he meets many local people who show him their culture, they welcome him and share what they can. It is a little uncomfortable at points, where he seems like he is taking advantage of some people who really do not have a lot but give what they do have so freely. A couple of times this gets him in trouble, like when he is accidentally taken in by the local drug lords son. That aside, most of the stories he tells of those he meets reflect the joy he must have experienced being able to see into their lives and cultures, even briefly.

He stops by at historic places along the way too, taking detours to visit temples and sites of confrontations. The Golden Temple at Amritsar stood out to me as sounding like an absolutely amazing place to visit.

Transitions between areas of different religions showed a couple of things, the border regions amplified the differences between them so he could feel the difference as he moved from Christian to Muslim to Sikh to Hindu areas, but also how little difference there is between the peoples who live in each of these areas, they are all just people getting on with their lives, all people who welcome him.

His writing style takes a little getting used to, laden with adjectives as a recent history graduate – he makes a point in the introduction to say that he purposefully didn’t rewrite it for publication, because he didn’t want to lose the raw spirit of his adventure.

Books describing journeys like this always bring me joy, I want to see all those places, meet those people, but I cannot muster the commitment needed to pursue a journey like this, there is no option to do it in a weekend or piecemeal. You have to live it. For months. The next best thing is to read about someone else doing it.