Caalim 1

Raven Caalim

Professor Keith Hess

Philosophy 102

6 September 2022

Philosophy homework #1

Based on the cover, the book will most likely teach me new techniques to read a book

faster with more comprehension. Part 1 focuses on reading, whether that be how books should be

read or different levels of reading strategies. Part 2 focuses highly on understanding the author’s

message or purpose of the book, with the beginning of the part being on classifying the book.

Part 3 goes into depth on how to read different types of informative books, and part 4 is about

deep reading to fully comprehend. I see references to tons of informative works such as the

Communist Manifesto and Crime and Punishment along with the names of philosophers such as

Aristotle and Plato. From the Publisher’s blurb I learned that the book is supposed to teach us

different approaches to reading inorder to shorten the time it takes to comprehend and extract the

author’s message from the book. Based on my in and out reading of chapters 1-11, Mortimer

Adler is trying to teach us how to read a book for comprehension along with determining the

author’s main point or message from the book.

Mortimer Adler’s book “How to Read a Book” is about learning to comprehend a book

and extract the author’s message using reading strategies. This book teaches how to understand

and how to collect information from a book by skimming and reading at a fast pace that your

comprehension can stick with. When understanding another book, Adler wants the reader to

discover the theme of the book, the main ideas and arguments, whether the book's ideas are true,

and why it is important to the reader to absorb the information. He often talks about reading
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carefully, such as paying extra attention to titles to grasp what is inside the text. In order to find

the main ideas and arguments, Adler recommends looking for synonyms that are repeated and

stressed. Lastly, Adler wants people to keep prejudice of a text out before and during the reading

in order to counter or agree with the author in the correct manner.

Mortimer Adler’s book is about learning to comprehend a book and extract the author’s

message using reading strategies. Reading efficiently is about properly pre-reading the cover,

index, back cover, and chapter to extract any context information about what is to be discussed in

the pages, then reading once through without stopping, dipping into important paragraphs and

out of filler paragraphs. He also gets along the point of understanding the author’s message and

main points when reading the book without prejudice, in order to find good reasons on where the

author was right and wrong, to squeeze out every bit of information. In whole, the book is true as

he creates realistic standards for reading pace and comprehension. It is important to know what

the author is conveying as it reduces the time wasted on trying to read other books, which is a

necessity to not waste time.

This is a nonfiction book, as it uses real comparisons and talks on a real subject. The

book is practical because, like a manual, it teaches how you should do something compared to

making you formulate how you should do something.