How to Read a Book

In How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and his co-author Charles Van Doren take a nuanced approach to the fast reading versus slow reading debate, and persuasively argue for a hybrid approach: strategic and active skimming in order to determine key points. Following this, you can gauge whether the book is worth more of your (valuable) time, and if you should engage in progressively more advanced levels of reading.

They also make deeper pedagogical points throughout his book:

The questions philosophers ask are simply more important than the questions asked by anyone else. Except children… The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking

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We are discussing here the virtue of teachability – a virtue that is almost always misunderstood. Teachabilty is often confused with subservience. A person is wrongly thought to be teachable if he is passive and pliable. On the contrary, teachability is an extremely active virtue. No one is really teachable who does not freely exercise his power of independent judgement. He can be trained, perhaps, but not taught. The most teachable reader is, therefore, the most critical.  He is the reader who finally responds to a book by the greatest effort to make up his own mind on the matters the author has discussed.

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A good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life

Perhaps most valuably, the book includes a recommended reading list of books from 137 authors.