How to read a book

Reading a book well takes three steps. You can do the first one tonight.

1. Look the book over. Before you read page one, spend a few minutes with the whole book. Read the cover, the list of chapters and the last page. You are finding out what the book is about and what its parts are.
2. Read it once without stopping. Start at page one and keep going to the end. When you do not understand something, put a small question mark beside it and read on.
3. Read it again, slowly, with a pencil. Now you know where the book is going. After each chapter, close the book and write what it said, in a few sentences of your own.

Not every book needs all three steps. For many books, the quick look and one reading are enough. Keep the second reading for a book you want to understand well.

Read a hard book the same way, and do not skip the second reading. Most people get stuck on a hard book because they try to understand every page before they turn it. You do not have to.

The first reading: keep going.

When a page makes no sense, do not stop to work it out. Put a small question mark beside it and read on. You will come back to it later (the Open University). Look up a word only when you cannot follow the page without it.

A first reading has one job, which is to get you to the last page. When you know where the book ends up, the hard pages make more sense.

The second reading: slowly, with a pencil.

Now go back to the parts that matter, and to your question marks. After each chapter, close the book. Write what the chapter said in three or four sentences of your own. Then open the book and check what you missed (the Open University). The page on how to annotate a book shows what to mark as you go.

If you can, wait a few days between the two readings. In studies, a second reading helped people more when they waited before it than when they read the text again right away (Dunlosky and colleagues, 2013).

If a part still makes no sense, leave it for a few days. Then come back to it (the Open University).

A philosophy book: read for the main point first.

Philosophy is hard because each step depends on the step before it. So read a chapter once, quickly, to find the main point the writer wants you to accept. Then go back and read slowly for the reasons. Only then decide if you agree. A philosopher who teaches this, Jim Pryor, tells his students that he still has to read a piece several times.

Active reading means you ask questions while you read, and you try to answer them. What is this chapter about? What reasons does it give? Do I agree? Keep a pencil in your hand and write short notes beside the text. Writing a note takes more thought than highlighting, so you are more likely to remember it (the Open University).

Close reading means reading one short part slowly, more than once, and looking hard at the exact words. Whatever you say about that part, you can point to the words on the page that show it. American school standards describe it this way. Nobody reads a whole book like that. Use it for the few paragraphs that the rest of the book depends on.

A hard book takes fewer hours than most people expect. At the average adult reading speed, a book of 400 pages takes about 7h 47m to read once, and about 15h 34m to read twice (Brysbaert, 2019). A hard book goes slower than that, so plan for more.

The hard part is keeping the hours going. At 45 minutes a day, 5 days a week, two readings take about 5 weeks. So pick a time of day for the book, and count the days you kept it. The page on how to read more shows how to find the minutes.

Every piece of advice on this page links to one of the sources below. We read each one for this page, the whole text or its summary.

1. The Open University, Critical reading techniques (read October 9, 2026). Use an efficient approach.
2. The Open University, Critical reading techniques (read October 9, 2026). How to take notes.
3. The Open University, Critical reading techniques (read October 9, 2026). Active reading.
4. The Open University, Critical reading techniques (read October 9, 2026). Coping with difficult content.
5. Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J. and Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students' Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4 to 58.
6. Jim Pryor, teaching notes for philosophy students (read October 7, 2026). Guidelines on Reading Philosophy.
7. Council of Chief State School Officers and National Governors Association (read October 7, 2026). Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects.
8. Brysbaert (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language.

The Open University gives its students the same order for any text: look it over quickly, then read it with care. Reading a book in stages is also an old idea. A well-known guide with the same name as this page set it out in 1972: How to Read a Book, by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren.