How to Read Great Books

Great books of the Western tradition, or indeed any tradition, can be daunting on first encounter. Part of the reason is their eminence, part their mystique and part their aura. The challenges they present derive from their distance from us -- often centuries, occasionally millennia -- as with Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics or Euclid’s Elements (a favorite of Abraham Lincoln). Their remoteness may also come, however, from cultural distance, as with Confucius’s Analects, the Japanese Tale of Genji or the Hindu Bhagavad Gita.

As professional educators, we read the great books because they form part of our intellectual tradition and have had a profound influence not only on the academic world but also on aspects of our nonacademic lives. It’s the ideas of the great books that matter -- whether Adam Smith’s invisible hand in market economies, Machiavelli’s advice about using fear in exercising political power, Freud’s representation of the unconscious mind, Du Bois’s explanation of racial double consciousness, de Beauvoir’s theorizing about gender or Montaigne’s essaying of the self.

We can read toward self-knowledge and learn things about ourselves previously unrecognized. A great book can serve as a kind of optical instrument offered to help us discern what, without that book, we would perhaps never have seen in ourselves. A great book, reflectively, can become for us a path to self-realization, even a form of therapy: bibliotherapy. We can accept or reject what books tell us; we can change ourselves in response to them or not. But their therapeutic potential exists, nonetheless.

Recognizing ourselves in books involves moments of personal illumination that lead to deepened self-understanding. Reading great books provides opportunities not only to increase our knowledge but also to improve our judgment. It creates occasions for discernment.

Let’s consider, briefly, the case of Montaigne’s essays. A number of writers -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf and André Gide among them -- have suggested that in reading Montaigne writing about himself, we become convinced we are reading about ourselves. Each individual reader encounters himself or herself while reading Montaigne’s essays, even though his essays reveal Montaigne himself in all his splendid singularity. Montaigne’s individuality, the minute particulars of mind he displays in essay after essay, was formed, paradoxically, through a study of ancient writers, primarily Roman -- Latin having been his first language, serving his everyday needs as well as his educational ones, taking priority over French and the Gascoigne dialect of his native Bordeaux.

Montaigne said that he wrote about himself because he knew himself better than he knew anything or anyone else. In “Of Repentance,” he writes, “No man ever treated of a subject that he knew and understood better than I do this … and in this I am the most learned man alive.” Montaigne notes, however, that he exists in a state of flux: “I must adapt my history to the moment, for I may presently change, not only by chance, but also by intention,” he writes, and “I do not portray being, but passing.” His essays, he claims, are “a record of diverse and changeable events, of undecided, and … contradictory ideas.” The title of his essay “On the Inconsistency of Our Actions” captures this sense of human variability. Who among us can deny seeing ourselves in Montaigne’s characterization of his inconsistencies, his fluctuating feelings and attitudes, his momentary confusions, and his repeated attempts to understand himself?

You may read the works of Montaigne, of Homer or Dante, of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill, of Toni Morrison or Simone de Beauvoir because you are curious about them. You may read them for the challenges they present. And you may read them to demonstrate your commitment to an intellectual ideal you have set yourself. When you read works such as these with other people, you can share your insights and your questions. When you read a great book on your own, the challenge is greater; nonetheless, you can do some things to increase your understanding and deepen your reading pleasure.

Here are a few suggestions.

First, consider the book’s genre as a philosophical work, a sacred religious text, a political treatise, a social analysis, a work of history or fiction, or some combination of these and other possible generic variations. A work’s genre makes particular kinds of demands upon us and creates certain expectations. We don’t expect narrative suspense from The Wealth of Nations or The Prince, and we don’t expect philosophizing from Great Expectations or Pride and Prejudice -- although some treatises incorporate narrative elements and some fictional works include philosophical speculation -- 19th-century Russian novels, for instance. We read great novels for what they reveal about human psychology and the social worlds they depict -- as, for example, in the novels of Austen and Dickens, of Ellison and Morrison. But the psychological insights, social revelations and philosophical speculation in fiction differ from their methodical and systematic presentation in nonfiction genres.

Second, consider the work’s contexts: historical, social, cultural, religious, political. Plato’s Dialogues and Aristotle’s treatises emerged in fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. Athens during a golden age of philosophical thought. Adam Smith penned his founding tome in economic theory and practice at the time of the American Revolution. Machiavelli’s The Prince was written during a period of local warfare among Italian city-states in the Renaissance. Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov during a time of intellectual ferment and debate about Russia’s relationship with the West. Understanding those multiple contexts enriches our understanding. Consider, too, how any great book is part of a tradition, how it speaks to works that precede it and perhaps anticipates those that follow.

Getting at the Essence

Knowing a book’s genre and understanding its varied contexts orient us in our reading. That kind of knowledge, however, valuable as it may be, is no substitute for the process of reading the work itself carefully and thoughtfully. So what might you do to enhance your reading one of the great books, especially when you are on your own? How can you get at the essence of any great book? I suggest that you read: 1) purposefully, 2) deliberatively, 3) relationally, 4) interpretively and 5) evaluatively.

• Purposeful reading requires reading intentionally -- for engagement, intellectual development, solace, companionship or some combination of these and more.
• Deliberative reading is slow, careful reading. It requires thinking, pondering, weighing and considering a work’s ideas and values.
• Relational reading highlights connections -- between and among sentences, paragraphs, chapters and longer sections of a work. It also involves establishing connections between the work under consideration and those previously read.
• Interpretive reading is analytical reading -- making observations about the work, seeing connections among those observations, formulating inferences from those and then developing a provisional interpretation.
• Evaluative reading requires a consideration of both a work’s value -- how highly we esteem it -- and its values, particularly its social, cultural, moral and other dispositions.

Following a process of reading, relying on a method is important. A process and a method enable us to read challenging books with increased understanding and enjoyment. The richer the reading process and method, the more rewarding the reading experience.

One approach to a more fulfilling experience of reading is to convert my five recommended ways of reading to questions to guide our reading practices.

• What is your purpose in reading the great book you have in hand or on a computer screen? It’s likely you have multiple purposes in mind. Whatever those purposes, it’s important to be clear about them. And if you are reading a great book with others, it’s important for those purposes to be transparent, so you are working in concert toward shared goals in your reading and not reading at cross-purposes. I like to identify for myself a pragmatic purpose (I’m reading a dialogue of Plato, for example, to reference it in an article or book I’m writing) and a personal purpose (I’ve never read Plato’s Laws, and I’m curious about what it says).
• How can you read more deliberately and deliberatively? One effective way to sample and savor a great writer’s thought and expression is to make notes as you read -- to annotate the text. Jot comments and questions in the margins. Perhaps list the key passages on a blank page in the front or back of the book, with a quick note about the topic or idea of each marked passage. The key is to slow down and think. Making notes can help you in that. You can also slow down to reread sentences, paragraphs and important sections aloud. The ear catches things the eye overlooks; the ear helps the eye to see.
• How can you relate a particular great book to what you have read elsewhere and already know through experience? What connections can you make, for example, in your reading and your life, with what Machiavelli says in The Prince about how to acquire, grow and maintain power? I’m currently reading Robert A. Caro’s The Power Broker, about Robert Moses, the architect of New York City’s boroughs and its suburbs’ expanse of parkways and expressways, bridges and beaches, public housing and parks. How is Machiavelli’s thinking about princely power related to Robert Moses’s exercise of power? Who benefits and who suffers from the exercise of that power? To what extent and in what ways are Machiavelli and Caro’s Robert Moses alive in national and world politics today?
• What kinds of analytical practices can you apply to your reading of great books? What elements of an analytical reading process can you use for a more satisfying experience reading great books? I recommend the following process: observing, connecting, inferring and concluding (provisionally). Everything begins with and is grounded in observation -- with what you notice about the work -- its ideas and emphases; its structure and form; its details of language (diction, imagery, syntax); its forms of evidence and more. Based on those observations, we make connections, establish relationships, put things together. Those connected observations lead to inferences, educated guesses grounded in observed connections and perceived relationships -- textual evidence that leads to provisional conclusions or interpretations, which are, of course, subject to revision. Those four stages are not simply linear; they are recursive; we loop back and project ahead as we make our way patiently and attentively through a great book.
• What forms of evaluation might you bring to bear on your reading of the great books? One type of evaluation is to assess the quality of the ideas and the persuasiveness of the evidence an author brings in their support. Another is the work’s value for you personally as a reader -- how and why it matters for you, for the way you think, for the way you live, for how you understand yourself, the world and other people. An additional kind of value that overlaps with these is a work’s aesthetic value -- its beauty of form and of idea. And we can consider as well the kinds of values a work reflects and possibly embodies -- social and cultural values, religious and political values, for example -- and how those values stack up against our own.

So there you have them: purpose, deliberation, relationships, interpretation and evaluation. These ways of reading great books, and combining them methodically, can help us comprehend those challenging books comprehensively. They can also increase our pleasure in reading them.

And yet this approach to reading is only part of what’s needed. For any great book requires more than a single reading, however patient and scrupulous that initial reading might be. Rereading a great book enables us to catch things missed on a first pass through it. If we reread one at different stages of our lives, we see it differently -- partly because we are better readers, partly because we know more, and partly because we have become different people than we were on our first encounter. Some elements of our initial reading of Montaigne’s Essays or Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, for example, may remain fairly consistent on later encounters with those works. Other aspects, however, change because we have changed. And in a way, the books have changed along with us.

That’s the beauty and benefit of reading great books. We are never done with them, nor they with us. They become part of us, changing as we do, intertwined with our changing lives. That’s their most important value -- helping us to evolve and become who we are in the moment and who we will become in the future.