How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.

Reading list (1972 edition)[edit]1. Homer – Iliad, Odyssey2. The Old Testament3. Aeschylus – Tragedies4. Sophocles – Tragedies5. Herodotus – Histories6. Euripides – Tragedies7. Thucydides – History of the Peloponnesian War8. Hippocrates – Medical Writings9. Aristophanes – Comedies10. Plato – Dialogues11. Aristotle – Works12. Epicurus – Letter to Herodotus; Letter to Menoecus13. Euclid – Elements14. Archimedes – Works15. Apollonius of Perga – Conic Sections16. Cicero – Works17. Lucretius – On the Nature of Things18. Virgil – Works19. Horace – Works20. Livy – History of Rome21. Ovid – Works22. Plutarch – Parallel Lives; Moralia23. Tacitus – Histories; Annals; Agricola Germania24. Nicomachus of Gerasa – Introduction to Arithmetic25. Epictetus – Discourses; Encheiridion26. Ptolemy – Almagest27. Lucian – Works28. Marcus Aurelius – Meditations29. Galen – On the Natural Faculties30. The New Testament31. Plotinus – The Enneads32. St. Augustine – On the Teacher; Confessions; City of God; On Christian Doctrine33. The Song of Roland34. The Nibelungenlied35. The Saga of Burnt Njál36. St. Thomas Aquinas – Summa Theologica37. Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy;The New Life; On Monarchy38. Geoffrey Chaucer – Troilus and Criseyde; The Canterbury Tales39. Leonardo da Vinci – Notebooks40. Niccolò Machiavelli – The Prince; Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy41. Desiderius Erasmus – The Praise of Folly42. Nicolaus Copernicus – On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres43. Thomas More – Utopia44. Martin Luther – Table Talk; Three Treatises45. François Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel46. John Calvin – Institutes of the Christian Religion47. Michel de Montaigne – Essays48. William Gilbert – On the Loadstone and Magnetic Bodies49. Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote50. Edmund Spenser – Prothalamion; The Faerie Queene51. Francis Bacon – Essays; Advancement of Learning; Novum Organum, New Atlantis52. William Shakespeare – Poetry and Plays53. Galileo Galilei – Starry Messenger; Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences54. Johannes Kepler – Epitome of Copernican Astronomy; Concerning the Harmonies of the World55. William Harvey – On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals; On the Circulation of the Blood; On the Generation of Animals56. Thomas Hobbes – Leviathan57. René Descartes – Rules for the Direction of the Mind; Discourse on the Method; Geometry; Meditations on First Philosophy58. John Milton – Works59. Molière – Comedies60. Blaise Pascal – The Provincial Letters; Pensees; Scientific Treatises61. Christiaan Huygens – Treatise on Light62. Benedict de Spinoza – Ethics63. John Locke – Letter Concerning Toleration; Of Civil Government; Essay Concerning Human Understanding;Thoughts Concerning Education64. Jean Baptiste Racine – Tragedies65. Isaac Newton – Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy; Optics66. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz – Discourse on Metaphysics; New Essays Concerning Human Understanding;Monadology67. Daniel Defoe – Robinson Crusoe68. Jonathan Swift – A Tale of a Tub; Journal to Stella; Gulliver's Travels; A Modest Proposal69. William Congreve – The Way of the World70. George Berkeley – Principles of Human Knowledge71. Alexander Pope – Essay on Criticism; Rape of the Lock; Essay on Man72. Charles de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu – Persian Letters; Spirit of Laws73. Voltaire – Letters on the English; Candide; Philosophical Dictionary74. Henry Fielding – Joseph Andrews; Tom Jones75. Samuel Johnson – The Vanity of Human Wishes; Dictionary; Rasselas; The Lives of the Poets

The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.

....a good book can teach you about the world and about yourself. You learn more than how to read better; you also learn more about life. You become wiser. Not just more knowledgeable - books that provide nothing but information can produce that result. But wiser, in the sense that you are more deeply aware of the great and enduring truths of human life.

Television, radio, and all the sources of amusement and information that surround us in our daily lives are also artificial props. They can give us the impression that our minds are active, because we are required to react to stimuli from the outside. But the power of those external stimuli to keep us going is limited. They are like drugs. We grow used to them, and we continuously need more and more of them. Eventually, they have little or no effect. Then, if we lack resources within ourselves, we cease to grow intellectually, morally, and spiritually. And we we cease to grow, we begin to die.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D.83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry)84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History89. William Wordsworth – Poems90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love94. Lord Byron – Don Juan95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

To agree without understanding is inane. To disagree without understanding is impudent.

The great authors were great readers, and one way to understand them is to read the books they read.

The ability to retain a child's view of the world with at the same time a mature understanding of what it means to retain it, is extremely rare - and a person who has these qualities is likely to be able to contribute something really important to our thinking.

Wonder is the beginning of wisdom in learning from books as well as from nature.

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

The complexities of adult life get in the way of the truth. The great philosophers have always been able to clear away the complexities and see simple distinctions - simple once they are stated, vastly difficult before. If we are to follow them we too must be childishly simple in our questions - and maturely wise in our replies..

Is it too much to expect from the schools that they train their students not only to interpret but to criticize; that is, to discriminate what is sound from error and falsehood, to suspend judgement if they are not convinced, or to judge with reason if they agree or disagree?

A lecture has been well described as the process whereby the notes of the teacher become the notes of the student without passing through the mind of either.

A good book deserves an active reading. The activity of reading does not stop with the work of understanding what a book says. It must be completed by the work of criticism, the work of judging. The undemanding reader fails to satisfy this requirement, probably even more than he fails to analyze and interpret. He not only makes no effort to understand; he also dismisses a book simply by putting it aside and forgetting it. Worse than faintly praising it, he damns it by giving it no critical consideration whatever.

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

... The person who, at any stage of a conversation, disagrees, should at least hope to reach agreement in the end. He should be as much prepared to have his own mind changed as seek to change the mind of another ... No one who looks upon disagreement as an occasion for teaching another should forget that it is also an occasion for being taught.

If you ask a living teacher a question, he will probably answer you. If you are puzzled by what he says, you can save yourself the trouble of thinking by asking him what he means. If, however, you ask a book a question, you must answer it yourself. In this respect a book is like nature or the world. When you question it, it answers you only to the extent that you do the work of thinking an analysis yourself.

You must be able to say, with reasonable certainty, "I understand," before you can say "I agree," or "I disagree," or "I suspend judgment.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

There have always been literate ignoramuses who have read too widely and not well. The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning and folly which might be applied to the bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores.

The best protection against propaganda of any sort is the recognition of it for what it is. Only hidden and undetected oratory is really insidious. What reaches the heart without going through the mind is likely to bounce back and put the mind out of business. Propaganda taken in that way is like a drug you do not know you are swallowing. The effect is mysterious; you do not know afterwards why you feel or think the way you do.

In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you

The failure in reading -the omnipresent verbalism- of those who have not been trained in the arts of grammar and logic shows how lack of such discipline results in slavery to words rather than mastery of them.

Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

Good books are over your head; they would not be good for you if they were not. And books that are over your head weary you unless you can reach up to them and pull yourself up their level.

Finally, do not try to understand every word or page of a difficult book the first time through. This is the most important rule of all; it is the essence of inspectional reading. Do not be afraid to be, or to seem to be, superficial. Race through even the hardest book. You will then be prepared to read it well the second time.

Reading a book should be a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; if not, you probably should not be bothering with his book. But understanding is a two-way operation; the learner has to question himself and question the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. Marking a book is literally an expression of your differences or your agreements with the author. It is the highest respect you can pay him.

... always keep in mind that an article of faith is not something that the faithful assume. Faith, for those who have it, is the most certain form of knowledge, not a tentative opinion.

We are not told, or not told early enough so that it sinks in, that mathematics is a language, and that we can learn it like any other, including our own. We have to learn our own language twice, first when we learn to speak it, second when we learn to read it. Fortunately, mathematics has to be learned only once, since it is almost wholly a written language.