Advice on Reading Well

This post is swiped from Justin Taylor's blog:  Between Two Worlds: http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/. 

Philosopher Francis Bacon wrote in the 16th century:

Some books are to be tasted,
others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested.

Susan Wise Bauer uses this as a springboard to talk about the three stages to understanding any book: the grammar stage, the logic stage, and then the rhetoric stage:

First, you read the book at what I call the “grammar stage” level; just get through the book and try to understand the basic principles, the basic story, the basic argument. Don’t try to understand all of the book. Just create a mental overview of the ideas. The second stage of reading is the logic stage: after you’ve read the whole book, stop and think about what the book is saying, how it’s saying it, and try to decide whether or not you agree with it. And then, finally, you enter the third stage of reading: the rhetoric stage, in which you form an opinion about the book. Unfortunately, we have been trained from our earliest days to pick up a piece of writing and go straight to the rhetoric stage. Our first question, after we read twenty pages, is “What do I think about this book?” This habit of thought is epidemic, something that we’re taught to do from very early on.

She argues that we usually skip stages one and two and jump immediately to stage three, asking, “What does this mean? Do I understand it? Do I agree?” In order to understand, we first need to do the first two stages.

How? She suggests: First: go all the way through the book one time. Just turn all the pages. Mark anything that’s difficult, and keep going. Second: once you’ve gotten all the way through to the end of the book, go back to the marked sections. Rethink those parts that you didn’t understand. Reread the pages that seemed confusing to you. Eighty percent of the time, if you’ve gotten all the way to the end of the book, those initially puzzling paragraphs won’t puzzle you any more. You’ll see how they fit into the whole. Third: form an opinion. Talk to a friend about the book. Get a reading buddy. Promise each other that you are going to read the same book all the way through, reexamine the difficult parts, and then tell each other what you think about the book’s ideas. Explaining your opinions to someone else is the very best way to figure out what you really think. (And remember: to refuse to have an opinion until you come back to a book a second and then a third time is a very revolutionary thing to do.)

She then offers two additional suggestions. First: Keep a reading journal as a way of helping you to remember what your opinions are on each book.  Second: Consider reading chronologically in a single genre: fiction, poetry, drama, history, autobiography. Every writer builds on the work of those who came before. When you read chronologically, you begin to see the same techniques and strategies re-used, or re-imagined. The first epic poem you read is horribly difficult. The second is easier, because you recognize some of the elements you encountered in the first. The third is easier yet. But if you read first a poem, and then a play, and then a novel, you begin from ground zero of understanding each time.

Here is the link to Bauer's whole article:  http://www.memoriapress.com/articles/Stop-cleaning-the-kitchen.html.