How to Read a Book Revised and Updated Edition

We've got to understand the whole if we want to understand the part.

Adler and Van Doren in their book, How to Read a Book, they said, a well-stated unity indicates the major parts that compose the whole.

You cannot comprehend a whole without somehow seeing its parts.

But it is also true that unless you grasp the organization of its parts, you cannot know the whole comprehensively.

That's one of the powers of education, and not just reading, but education.

So if you feel like you don't like to read, you don't want to read, you're not a good reader, I'm gonna get, tell you to get a book, and that book is Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.

How to Read a Book.

[laughs]

[laughs] It is...

Record means for me, take notes, write down what God is saying, because this should be a conversation between you and the author.

Let me just read to you a little excerpt from the other book that I've introduced to you guys in the last few weeks called How to Read a Book.

where it essentially tells us that we have permission to take full ownership of the book by the way that we interact with it.

Let me read it to you now.

Now, How to Read a Book is written by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren.

And they said, when you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them.

But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book.

Yeah.

I remember one of the books that had a big impact on me was Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book.

I wonder for people who may want some advice from someone who spends their life surrounded by manuscripts, what advice would you give to somebody who wanted to be a better reader?

Well, I think it's like any task or any skill.

That's perfect.

I know I don't want to take up too much more time, Father, but I have to ask you, Mortimer Adler wrote a book called How to Read a Book, and it's a nice question.

I asked particularly how to read this book, since I'm encouraging all of our viewers to pick up this book and then get a signed copy when they come and find you.

at your retreats and such.

And now we're going to dive into more about how information can lead to transformation.

So we're picking up where I was about to introduce Frosty to another quote from the book that I have loved called How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren.

And let's pick up from there.

They said, to be informed is to know simply that something is the case.

Because I want to pull out a few things in a book that we have been referencing here on the podcast.

The book is called How to Read a Book, which I know when I first told you I'm reading that book, you thought it was a dumb

title.

I'm sure the book's good.

But what if you don't know how to read that book? That's a really hard place to start.

You just need elementary level reading to first start to engage with it.

But How to Read a Book, written in the 1940s, but actually... has such wisdom in it.

And so we're diving into it and I'm going to unpack it more with the podcast listeners over the coming weeks to help them upskill in their reading.