As always when I read about being a better reader I am—at least temporarily—inspired to practice what I read.

In The Well-Educated Mind Wise Bauer has two aims. One is to educate the reader on how to read more effectively. The other is to present a reading course which, if followed, would lead to someone having a sound foundation for different types of writing. The strength of this book comes in the intersection of those two themes. After discussing general strategies for reading effectively, each chapter of the book covers a particular type of reading (the novel, autobiography, history, drama, poetry, and science) and applies those strategies to the topic at hand. This is important because how one effectively reads, for example, poetry differs markedly from how one effectively reads drama.

This structure gives rise to the main weakness of this book. The chapters in part II are repetitive in structure. A brief definition of the area is followed by a history of writing in that area. This is followed by a detailed and somewhat repetitive overview of how to read works of that type and an annotated list of some foundational works. Like in many books which straddle the line between a reference work and a non-reference read, the structure allows each chapter to stand alone although it makes the book a less compelling read.

The heart of the model that Wise Bauer proposes is not novel but it is worth reviewing. Effective reading is not a matter of a particular note taking format (although she has some lightweight suggestions). It is a matter of organizing your reading into multiple stages: First, read for understanding. Make sure you understand what the author is saying and how they are saying it. Second, analyze the work. Evaluate what the author says and fit it into a broader framework of knowledge. What are the conclusions the author makes? Third, react to the work. Ultimately, do you agree or disagree with these conclusions? The specific questions a reader asks at each stage will vary with the type of work, but the stages are always the same. Note that this does not require reading the book three times, although for sufficiently deep works, this may be ideal. However, it does require thinking about the book multiple times.

A quick note on the annotated list of works. They are organized by the type of writing they are. This is an intentional decision because Wise Bauer's goal in organizing them is to give the reader a sense of that type of writing. These works could also be valuably organized by topic (black experience in America and Christianity being two that come up frequently throughout the lists). That would be a useful but different way of experiencing them. The annotations also contain useful notes on which translations are best which is useful, especially for older works with less accurate translations floating around. In the end, I mostly skimmed the annotations, figuring I would come back to them if I were to go through one of the reading sequences.

Although I think the discipline required to fully implement an approach like this is impractical to apply all the time, I do think that it is incredibly valuable to understand the reading process through these stages. Even if I, as a reader, only go through a lightweight version of this process, explicitly separating the process of understanding, evaluating, and reacting to a work will help me be a better reader and, I can hope, limit the degree to which I make mistakes of reacting to what I think a work says rather than what it actually says. ( )

Read the opening part and preamble to the fiction list -- going to start on the fiction list w/ Don Quixote in the fall. ( )