On Reading for Understanding with Notetaking
The three books about learning I return to most are Adler and Van Doren’s How to Read a Book, Henry Hazlitt’s Thinking as a Science, and Fr. A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life. They taught me how to learn from books, how to learn from thinking, and how reading and thinking fit into spiritual life.
They are consistently surprising and illuminating.
For instance, in Thinking as a Science, the entirely self-taught polymath Hazlitt reveals:
The writer finds that he nearly always derives benefit from reading for short periods, say ten or fifteen minutes.
As a natural infovore, perhaps an information monster, I recoil in horror.
Hazlitt’s advice is not a boast from a proud non-reader of books but the studied conclusion of a discerning reader seeking understanding:
At one time reading was regarded an untainted virtue, later it was seen that it did us no good unless we read good books, and now there is a dawning consciousness that even if we read good books they will benefit us little unless we read them in the right way.
In my youth I was totally indiscriminate in my reading. Much time would have been wasted if not for all I learned in those early years about the mechanics of the English language, writing, and reading itself. Later I became obsessed with “great books” believing that the classics were their own reward. Now I see books as an occasion to thinking, an aid to understanding, as Swami Vivekananda views the world itself:
The external world is simply the suggestion, the occasion, which sets you to study your own mind, but the object of your study is always your own mind. The falling of an apple gave the suggestion to Newton, and he studied his own mind. He rearranged all the previous links of thought in his mind and discovered a new link among them, which we call the law of gravitation. It was not in the apple nor in anything in the centre of the earth.
Too often books become talismans. Substitutes for genuine thinking and understanding. Reading can deaden thought. Words wash over failing to penetrate.
I’m trying to slow down and think it through, swirl it around, and let it seep in. Hazlitt recommends a 1:1 ratio of reading to unaided thinking. I use notetaking as a commitment device forcing me to slow down and think it through.
I’ve adapted the Cornell Notetaking system to this purpose. What is being said? What question is this answering? How does it fit together? How does this change my understanding?
45-minute sessions right now.
Next step: one hour.
Ideally two.
Becoming one of the highlights of my day!