I’ve found Adler’s & Van Doren’s “How to Read a Book” a consistently useful source of ideas & techniques in the last few years (h/t @collision). But I’ve never explicitly applied the *full* procedure of analytical reading to any text.
Have any of you? Worth the marginal benefit?
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I've read things that closely, or closer - some mathematics that I really wanted to master inside and out. But I remember concluding that much of Adler and Van Doren's prescriptions just seemed off, like they were theorizing, and hadn't really done it themselves.
That was certainly the case for their discussion of how to read technical books, which is well intentioned but not very good. The advice on more general reading is much better, but I doubt that it quite described how they themselves read. More a theory of how they ought to read
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That does ring true: it sounds almost like a catechism! "O, in my heart of hearts, on my best of days, this is how I wish I would read!"
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I still absolutely love that book though!
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This really resonates with me; I always found A&VD to be useful, but aspirational and prescriptive rather than realistic and descriptive. What’re the better resources you’ve found for grokking technical books?
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