The educators of the country have acknowledged that teaching the young to read, in the most elementary sense of that word, is our paramount educational problem. There has been a shift of interest from the reading of fiction to the reading of nonfiction. Today many more of the young men and women who complete high school enter and complete four years of college a much larger proportion of the population has become literate in spite of or even because of the popularity of radio and television. The reasons for doing so lie in changes that have taken place both in our society in the last thirty years and in the subject itself.
Why, then, attempt to recast and rewrite the book for the present generation of readers?
Since 1940, it has continued to be widely circulated in numerous printings, both hardcover and paperback, and it has been translated into other languages-French, Swedish, German, Spanish, and Italian. To my surprise and, I confess, to my delight, it immediately became a best seller and remained at the top of the nationwide best-seller list for more than a year. How to Read a Book was first published in the early months of 1940. Readers will learn when and how to “judge a book by its cover,” and also how to X-ray it, read critically, and extract the author’s message from the text.Īlso included is instruction in the different techniques that work best for reading particular genres, such as practical books, imaginative literature, plays, poetry, history, science and mathematics, philosophy and social science works.įinally, the authors offer a recommended reading list and supply reading tests you can use measure your own progress in reading skills, comprehension, and speed. Originally published in 1940, this book is a rare phenomenon, a living classic that introduces and elucidates the various levels of reading and how to achieve them-from elementary reading, through systematic skimming and inspectional reading, to speed reading. With half a million copies in print, How to Read a Book is the best and most successful guide to reading comprehension for the general reader, completely rewritten and updated with new material.Ī CNN Book of the Week: “Explains not just why we should read books, but how we should read them.
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