This book is more than a simple collection of techniques on how to read better. It's mostly a practical and deep essay, but it contains many philosophical analysis of different aspects of reading, what good literature is, or what a good reader does and read.

I've learned some of those strategies the hard way, as some comments point, and at the same time I'm grateful to be reading about how to improve my techniques.

The book it's not just a 'manual', it includes philosophical ideas on what reading is, how it should be done.............I think it definitely widens your reading experience and horizons. It gives you confidence, as one reader said, to tackle difficult books.

The part that impressed me more is the thought of reading classics by yourself, and I enjoy his tips and recommendations.

I'm going to buy it to have it as a reference for further reading, it's not definitely a book you can be done with in one reading.

It also has a very valuable system to classify books, it's important to know what you are reading to understand it. And thought provoking statements on readers being ACTIVE when reading even novels.

It kind of makes me feel a bit guilty about reading things that in his opinion would be cataloged as bad literature, but at the same time, I kind of agree that there are books that are worth reading and others who are a bit of a waste of your time. ( )

enlightening, helpful...so far.

I am writing this review only a few minutes after I became a member of Library Thing. This seemed to be a particularly apposite book to be the first added to my library, and the first to be reviewed. It's a wonderful classic, potentially valuable to most serious readers of all ages, and worth its weight in gold to young students.

I wish I'd read it when I was 15 or 16. When I was young, I read many books about which I can now remember little or nothing. In some cases, I can't even remember whether I've read them or not. This is not due to senility (not yet, I don't think!), but simply because at the time I didn't really know how to properly read a book. I naively thought I could just scan through the words and somehow, by some strange process of osmosis, everything in that book would be imprinted in my mind, for ever. Ha! Have you ever been more woefully misinformed?

By the time I came to read Mortimer Adler's classic, I had, by trial and error, picked up many of the skills, knowledge, rules and techniques outlined here. But it had been a slow and painful learning process, and I still learned quite a lot when I eventually got to read this classic.

This is a wonderful practical book that will help you when you read, to receive everything that the writer intended to communicate - which after all is the purpose of reading; to analyse it; to citicise it fairly; and to be articulate enough to agree or disagree with the author and be able to say why. I commend it most warmly. ( )

This book has really good ideas on how you should read books.

Even though a woman on the train laughed at me because of the title, this was a very useful work that I continue to recall and use. It's dense, but the die-hard reader will appreciate all of the insights and advice about the process of reading. It also offers some practical ways to take in a whole book by initially getting familiar with the structure. ( )