Meta-Books
Brendan Schlagel’s 100 opinions on books & readings. Favorite highlights:
Every curious person should be a serious reader.
Ever serious reader should build an antilibrary.
If you live in a city you should have at least one favorite bookstore.
Don't be precious about books!
Book clubs / reading groups are if anything underutilized as a structure for both socializing & for learning.
Your reading will ebb and flow. Roll with it.
Why books don’t work - mostly a ramp-up to thinking about tools of thoughts and cognitive learning models (which should really have its own page in the digital library), but includes useful section on using metacognition to retaining knowledge from reading if you don’t want to jump into the tools of thought world just yet
Metacognition- thinking and engaging with what you’re reading, drawing connections, challenging points, synthesizing and analyzing (not just summarizing).
Specific reflective questions:
“What questions should I be asking?”
“How should I summarize what I’m reading?”
“Did I understand that? Should I re-read it? Consult another text?”
“What does it feel like to understand something? Where are my blind spots?”
Mortimer J. Adler’s four dimensions of reading
Elementary reading
Examine front, back, genre, general aims
Inspectional reading
Determine if the book is worth reading, by skimming it, understanding what it's about and its structure, getting the gist of the forest and not the trees
Before reading, generate questions (like headings into questions) and look for answers in the text
Analytical reading
Understand exactly what the author wants to communicate
Structural stage - see the outline, study the order and relation
Interpretative stage - construct the author's argument, spot major keywords, distill main propositions
Critical stage- judge the soundness of the argument, the merit of its reasoning
Syntopical reading - read many books on specific topic to compare arguments
Drawing a map while exploring new territory
See: Syntopicon
How to know you understand a book
What is the book as a whole? (elementary reading)
What is being said in detail, and how? (analytical reading)
Invest time in truly understanding the introduction and conclusion
That’s where authors get to the crux of their argument
Is the book true, in whole or part? (analytical reading)
Apply constructive criticism to the book- is the reasoning sound? Any holes in argument?
What of it?
Compare the book to others in the same topic
Imagine being seated at large table beside authors and joining conversation
John Vervaeke’s Philosophical Fellowship
A reading exercise beyond reading comprehension but changing our relationship to reading.
Through meditation, noticing, and assigned roles, we can change our reading experience from literally looking at for specific and explicit semantic content to something we experience more poetically (creating a whole world, step inside it, moving inside it, speaking to it and being spoken by it as if the text was a person).
What's even more unusual is that you do it in a collective, amongst others, in a ceremony.
We’re not trying to read the text but read it from the place it's being spoken from, and noticing what happens to us when we find ourselves there.
Reading Secular Work as a Sacred Text
The text itself was a doorway into reflection and meditation. In his pamphlet, Guigo furthered centuries of sacred reading instruction and simplified his guidance into the four steps of a ladder. He named these as reading, meditating, praying, and contemplating.
What’s literally happening in the narrative? Where are we in the story?
What allegorical images, stories, songs or metaphors show up for you?
What experiences have you had in your own life that come to mind?
What actions are you being called to take/
How to make reading more social?
A book lover’s book: An Unnecessary Woman
Some of my favorite books:
“I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
