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Comment by philwelch | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there's a bootstrapping issue here, though. What do I read in order to learn to read How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler? Or do I merely read that book once, in order to learn the technique, before re-reading it?

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Pick a section of a book you like and do an “Adler read” on that section. Identify the main question, supporting points, and conclusion of each of those sections in the margins.

Short passages or a couple chapters can be really rewarding. “What is the author actually connecting this to?” “Are these questions being addressed one at a time, or too many at once” etc.

We used Adler as a starting point for a bunch of school books and did these as assignments - while it was painful it upped my game and brought so much more out of the book.

I'm in the process of reading Adler's book now, and I've found it's pretty bootstrap-able. I've been able to apply the lessons as I go along, and I've even gone back to earlier sections and increased the "resolution" of my understanding so to speak by applying later techniques.

Yeah this was my EXACT complaint. Hopefully there’s an audio book version, or a 1-800 number you can call to ask to have it explained to you.

There is an audio book version: How to Read a Book, narrated by Edward Holland [0]

[0] https://www.audible.com/pd/How-to-Read-a-Book-Audiobook/B003...

Sadly not available in the UK

If you use audible.com, all you need to do is change the billing country to US. Suddenly all books previously unavailable can be purchased.

Country doesn't affect card payments in my case (Monzo) but worse case scenario you can use points.

Very interesting, thanks.

Hope that it’s designed to work even for people who don’t know how to read yet

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