How To Read A Book

For those of us whose life involves reading on a regular basis, I recommend How To Read A Book, by Mortimer Adler. While the text is somewhat dry and academic, his tips are highly useful for extracting the most from a book without reading it cover to cover.

Some of his top ideas include-

• Use the Table of Contents to get page count and learn what the author(s) wrote the most about
• Read the first and last pages of a chapter to get an idea of topics covered
• Use syntopical reading (reading several books on a subject) to thoroughly understand a topic