How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Charles van Doren

philosophical work afford are not the same.
    The problems dealt with by a book on physics and one on morals are not the same, nor are the methods the writers employ in solving such different problems.
    Thus this first rule of analytical reading, though it is applicable to all books, applies particularly to nonfictional, expository works. How do you go about following the rule, particularly its last clause?
    As we have already suggested, you do so by first inspecting the book-giving it an inspectional reading. You read the title, the subtitle, the table of contents, and you at least glance at the preface or introduction by the author and at the index.
    If the book has a dust jacket, you look at the publisher's blurb.
    These are the signal flags the author waves to let you know which way the wind is blowing. It is not his fault if you will not stop, look, and listen.
    What You Can Learn from the Title of a Book
    The numbers of readers who pay no attention to the signals is larger than you might expect. We have had this experience again and again with students. We have asked them what a book was about. We have asked them, in the most general terms, to tell us what sort of book it was. This is a good way, almost an indispensable way, to begin a discussion of a book.
    Nevertheless, it is often hard to get any kind of answer to the question.
    Let us take a couple of examples of the kind of confusion that can occur. In 1859, Darwin published a very famous book.
    A century later the entire English-speaking world celebrated the publication of the book. It was discussed endlessly, and its influence was assessed by learned and not-so-learned commentators. The book was about the theory of evolution, and the word "species" was in the title. What was the title?
    Probably you said The Origin of Species, in which case you were correct. But you might not have said that. You might have said that the title was The Origin of the Species. Recently, we asked some twenty-five reasonably well-read persons what the title of Darwin's book was and more than half said The Origin of the Species. The reason for the mistake is obvious; they supposed, never having read the book, that it had something to do with the development of the human species. In fact, it has little or nothing to do with that subject, which Darwin covered in a later book, The Descent of Man.
    The Origin of Species is about what its title says it is about -namely the proliferation in the natural world of a vast number of species of plants and animals from an originally much smaller number of species, owing mainly to the principle of natural selection. We mention this common error because many think they know the title of the book, although few have actually ever read the title carefully and thought about what it means.
    Here is another example. In this case we will not ask you to remember the title, but to think about what it means.
    Gibbon wrote a famous, and famously long, book about the Roman Empire. He called it The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Almost everybody who takes up the book recognizes that title; and most people, even without the book in their hand, know the title. Indeed, the phrase "decline and fall" has become proverbial. Nevertheless, when we asked the same twenty-five well-read people why the first chapter is called "The Extent and Military Force of the Empire in the Age of the Antonines," they had no idea. They did not see that if the book as a whole was titled Decline and Fall, then it might be assumed that the narrative would begin with the high point of the Roman Empire, and continue through to the end.
    Unconsciously, they had translated "decline and fall" into "rise and fall." They were puzzled because there was no discussion of the Roman Republic, which ended a century and a half before the Age of the Antonines. If they had read the title carefully they could have assumed that the Age of the Antonines was the high point of the Empire, even if they had