Friday, August 8, 2008

How to read a book

The title indicates that this is a guideline text book, which shows the reader how to read book in general. At first, it is surprising and somewhat funny because most of us know how to read book.

Below is my story how I met this book and how I really understood how to read a book:

When I first came to Ulsan, the professor gave me a book in my major and asked me to present 5 chapters every month. Ok, it seemed simple. However, when I started, I faced to strange terminologies and complicated arguments. Is there anything wrong here? The more I tried, the more complicated it is. In fact, after using popular utilities like Google, Wikipedia and dictionaries, I still think that there’s something that I haven’t read between the lines. As I calmed down, a question raised in my mind “Do I read correctly?” as a innocent behavior, I tried to googler “How to read a book”. Result? The book appears in the first page in total of 70,700,000 results!!!

I read some comments and reviews about the book and the author and believed that this was a good book: First, the author introduce typical kinds of reading, including reading for information, reading for knowledge and reading for synthesis and critics, which are increasingly difficult as regard to this order. Then, the author explains his opinion about failures of United States education related to the lack of reading practice. He argues that teachers usually transfer knowledge they got from books to student but not teach the students how to read those books. Last but not least, there are the rules to follow when reading a book

In a word, if you only want to know about the rules, you should read the summary of rules and the mind map of rules. But if you want to become an expert in reading book, you should read this book carefully and then follow strictly the rules. After reading the book, I realize that: my English need to be improved; read the instruction before using; great authors are also great readers.

You can read the book online at this address

http://www.cyberspacei.com/greatbooks/h2/how2read/h2r_contents.htm