Do you know how to read a book?

Scott Ginsberg, at HELLO, My name is BLOG, asks, "How do you read a book?"
He lists three styles:

1. Superficial Eyes
2. Student Eyes
3. Creative Eyes

Edward de Bono describes what he calls Dense Reading. De Bono explains that Dense Reading is the opposite of fast reading or survey reading, which is designed to get the big picture of what the is about to be read.

“Dense reading involves a lot of thinking. Implications can often only be seen if our thinking creates a number of possible situations around what is being read.

The following is an example put forth by De Bono in his book De Bono’s Thinking Course.

Consider the implications of the following remark which I once made to a class in Barcelona: “It seems to me that there are a lot of shoe stores in Barcelona.”
The implications could include the following:

That I had visited the part of town where the shoe stores were located.
That I had probably walked rather than gone by car.
That there was a part of town with a large number of shoe shops.
That I may have wanted to buy some shoes or had other special interest in shoes stores.
That there were good profit margins on shoes in Spain.
That people wore more shoes.
That people bough shoes in Barcelona
That shoes wore out more quickly.
That there were no very big shoes stores.
That business property taxes were low in Barcelona
That there were few shoe stores in other parts of town.

Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren describe 4 levels of reading in their classic, How To Read A Book.

Level 1 is Elementary Reading.
At this level one masters the basics of reading.

Level 2 is Inspectional Reading.
At this level the aim it to get the most out of the book in a limited amount of time. This would include skimming or pre-reading.

Level 3 is Analytical Reading.
At this level the goal is to get the most effective and complete reading given an unlimited amount of time. This is reading to understand.

Level 4 is Syntopical Reading.
At this level, the goal is to construct an analysis of the subject by placing many books in relation to one another. This allows the reader to construct an analysis that is not necessarily presented in any one book. Another term for this is comparative reading.

Rob Jacobs

Comments

[HELLO, my name is Scott]

thanks for the link love!