Author
Charles Van Doren
The editor who helped turn How to Read a Book into the edition most readers know.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Charles Van Doren (1926–2019) was an American writer and editor from a literary family: his father Mark Van Doren was a poet and Columbia professor. He taught English at Columbia University in the 1950s, and in 1957 became nationally famous as a long-running champion on the television quiz show Twenty-One. In 1959 he told a congressional committee that the show's producers had given him answers in advance, and he left Columbia.
He rebuilt his working life around reference books and general readers. He worked for many years at Encyclopaedia Britannica alongside Mortimer J. Adler, co-wrote the 1972 revised and expanded edition of How to Read a Book with him, and later wrote A History of Knowledge (1991), a single-volume tour of human ideas for non-specialists.
The signature
Van Doren's contribution to How to Read a Book is the practical turn of the revised edition: it widened the method beyond philosophy to history, science, imaginative literature and practical books, and gave each kind of book its own reading rules. His own later work follows the same instinct: make large bodies of knowledge readable without making them shallow.
The questions they work on
- How should the way we read change with the kind of book in front of us?
- Can a general reader follow the history of ideas without becoming a specialist?
- What does a reader owe a book before judging it?
Thinking tools
- Inspectional ReadingUses and explains it
Inspectional reading is Adler and Van Doren's systematic skimming: in a fixed, short time you examine a book's title, preface, contents, index, opening and closing chapters and a few pages here and there, to learn what kind of book it is, what it argues and whether it deserves a full reading.
Learn it: Read More and Remember It, Station 2 - Syntopical ReadingUses and explains it
Syntopical reading is Adler and Van Doren's highest level of reading: reading several books on the same subject together, around a question you have chosen, translating their authors' different terms into a shared vocabulary, and working out where they agree, where they disagree and what answer you can build from them.
Learn it: Read More and Remember It, Station 8
Limits and fair objections
Every kind of book can be read with one shared method, adjusted with a few rules per genre.
The genre rules were written for printed books of the mid-twentieth century. Many of today's readers learn from articles, papers and digital sources that do not fit those categories neatly, so the rules work best as a starting point rather than a complete map.
Stands on: an argument · BookYol's reading