How to Read a Book {original} (1940)

Case 1 shelf 4

This is the most overrated book I've read in a while. People rate it a "5/5", it's really a 2-3/5. It might be worthwhile if you don't know how to "read" well (as in, asking questions while reading, analyzing the book, comparing the viewpoints of multiple books), but if you're a reasonable human being, you already know this, and don't require hundreds of pages of needlessly verbose and condescending prose to explain it.

The authors get extra points for creating arbitrary and essentially worthless distinctions of multiple times, then indexing each of these on independent 4-part scales. This lets them say amazing things about reading the fourth type of book at the third level leads to the fourth point, etc.

Skip. There should be a worthwhile book about this topic, but this isn't it. ( )

From the back of the book: "It is the only self-improvement book I have ever read that did not make me want to go out and start improving things by assassinating the author."