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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

How to Read a Book has been on my list for the longest time. I might have to finally give it a go. Is the book very dense? I think one of the reasons I've held off is because I have a suspicion that it could probably be distilled down to the length of a magazine article...

I read a decent amount and enjoy it, but I feel in the end I don't get much from it. The time doesn't feel well spent. FWIW, I try to alternate fiction with non-fiction.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff just published a blog post that appears to be a summary of the book, which you might find interesting.

https://nesslabs.com/how-to-read-a-book

Thanks for the link! Have you read the book? Is the article you linked to a decent summary of the book?

It is a very good summary; matches a lot of my own notes on it. One thing to note though...

> Adler’s main point in the first section of his work about how to read a book is that it’s best to gain knowledge straight from the source. Instead of going through a teacher sharing the main points of a book, he considered it better to read the book yourself. He called this concept “original communication”—the idea that information coming directly from those who first discovered an idea is the best way of gaining an understanding.

Also worth checking out is Adler's "How to Mark a Book" : http://chuma.cas.usf.edu/~pinsky/mark_a_book.htm

Read though the first section thoroughly (I recommend attempting all the strategies presented in it on the book itself), and then skim through the "how to read this type of book" section - it's really not necessary and much less enjoyable of a read IMO.

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