Reading a book is a skill that everyone can learn. In this post, we’ll go through the second stage of reading1: analytical reading. It builds on the first stage: intelligent skimming and superficial reading, which I covered in the previous post.

Few books are worth reading, and they’re bound to be challenging. As the authors of How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading say:

If a book is easy and fits nicely into all your language conventions and thought forms, then you probably will not grow much from reading it. It may be entertaining, but not enlarging to your understanding. It’s the hard books that count. Raking is easy, but all you get is leaves; digging is hard, but you might find diamonds.

Reading tough books is an active exercise - you have to be engaged, and it’s not something you do whilst on your pillow just before bed (although reading challenging books is a great way of drifting off to sleep).

After the first stage of reading, you should know the structure of the book and its conclusions. Analytical reading helps you dive deeper into the arguments that lead to the conclusions.

How to read analytically

1. Understand the problem the author wants to solve

This is the most important step in analytical reading: you should articulate the problem the author is trying to solve. Without this step, reading can often just be a mental exercise.

2. Come to terms with the author

The author will use many words, but not all of them will be important. It’s relatively easy to identify the important ones - the author will often explicitly define them, or contrast the way they’ve used them to how other authors have. The important words are also likely to be the ones you’ll have trouble with - you might need to look the second or third meanings in the dictionary.

3. Find the key propositions

A proposition is a sentence the author uses to make a point - it should be backed up by evidence or reasoning. If it isn’t, it’s simply the author’s opinion and should be treated that way.

4. Construct the author’s argument

Sometimes the author explicitly states how their propositions lead to arguments, but most of the time we have to construct the argument using propositions from different paragraphs. The propositions should build on each other, and shouldn’t be contradictory. Once you’re convinced that you understand an argument, you should restate it in your own words. Writing it down is best: reading and writing go hand in hand.

5. So what?

As you’re digesting the arguments, you should be asking ‘so what?’ i.e. why is this relevant? What does it mean? Does it solve the problems the author framed?

6. Criticizing a book

Reading is a conversation between you and the author: you ask the book questions, rather than simply receiving information. The first rule of criticism is only to do so after you’ve finished and understood the book - it’s similar to any form of debate, where you should first hear out the other person.

Your reasons for criticising the author shouldn’t be vague (e.g. ‘it doesn’t sit right with me’), but should fall into one of these categories:

  1. The author is misinformed or not informed - when the author has stated something that isn’t true or missed some facts
  2. The author’s reasoning is flawed - when the author has succumbed to a logical fallacy
  3. The author’s analysis is incomplete - this is when the author hasn’t solved the problem they set out to

How to get the most out of reading

You need a pencil in your hand at all times to read actively. Whilst reading you should:

  • Underline key terms and propositions
  • Number the author’s propositions to keep track of them
  • Write notes in margins
  • Draw diagrams, especially of hierarchies
  • Reference other parts of the book where the author’s made similar points, or contradictory

You can do the same thing on a Kindle by highlighting and adding comments. I prefer the manual method because it’s more versatile: you can sketch diagrams, draw arrows connecting different parts of the text, and easily see all your annotations.

What’s next?

There is technically another stage after analytical reading: synoptical reading. This is where you read several books on the same topic and bring the different authors to your own terms to compare the merits of their arguments. “Knowing that more than one book is relevant to a particular question is the first requirement in any project of synoptical reading.”

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  1. In the authors’ book, there are four stages of reading: intelligent skimming; superficial reading; analytical reading; syntopical reading. I’ve condensed them.