Free How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading by Charles van Doren

pages in that book, but also to pages in other books.
    There is a step beyond even that, however, and a truly expert reader can take it when he is reading several books syntopically. That is to make notes about the shape of the discussion-the discussion that is engaged in by all of the authors, even if unbeknownst to them. For reasons that will become clear in Part Four, we prefer to call such notes dialectical.
    Since they are made concerning several books, not just one, they often have to be made on a separate sheet (or sheets) of paper. Here, a structure of concepts is implied-an order of statements and questions about a single subject matter. We will return to this kind of note-making in Chapter 20.
    Forming the Habit of Reading
    Any art or skill is possessed by those who have formed the habit of operating according to its rules. This is the way the artist or craftsman in any field differs from those who lack his skill.
    Now there is no other way of forming a habit of operation than by operating. That is what it means to say one learns to do by doing. The difference between your activity before and after you have formed a habit is a difference in facility and readiness. After practice, you can do the same thing much better than when you started. That is what it means to say practice makes perfect. What you do very imperfectly at first, you gradually come to do with the kind of almost automatic perfection that an instinctive performance has. You do something as if you were born to it, as if the activity were as natural to you as walking or eating. That is what it means to say that habit is second nature.
    Knowing the rules of an art is not the same as having the habit. When we speak of a man as skilled in any way, we do not mean that he knows the rules of making or doing something, but that he possesses the habit of making or doing it.
    Of course, it is true that knowing the rules, more or less explicitly, is a condition of getting the skill. You cannot follow rules you do not know. Nor can you acquire an artistic habit -any craft or skill- without following rules. The art as something that can be taught consists of rules to be followed in operation. The art as something learned and possessed consists of the habit that results from operating according to the rules.
    Incidentally, not everyone understands that being an artist consists in operating according to rules. People point to a highly original painter or sculptor and say, "He isn't following rules. He's doing something entirely original, something that has never been done before, something for which there are no rules." But they fail to see what rules it is that the artist follows. There are no final, unbreakable rules, strictly speaking, for making a painting or sculpture. But there are rules for preparing canvas and mixing paints and applying them, and for moulding clay or welding steel. Those rules the painter or sculptor must have followed, or else he could not have made the thing he has made. No matter how original his final production, no matter how little it seems to obey the "rules" of art as they have traditionally been understood, he must be skilled to produce it. And this is the art -the skill or craft-that we are talking about here.
    From Many Rules to One Habit
    Reading is like skiing. When done well, when done by an expert, both reading and skiing are graceful, harmonious activities. When done by a beginner, both are awkward, frustrating, and slow.
    Learning to ski is one of the most humiliating experiences an adult can undergo (that is one reason to start young) . After all, an adult has been walking for a long time; he knows where his feet are; he knows how to put one foot in front of the other in order to get somewhere. But as soon as he puts skis on his feet, it is as though he had to learn to walk all over again. He slips and slides, falls down, has trouble getting up, gets his skis crossed, tumbles again, and generally looks -and feels- like a