The Most Important Book I Read Before Seminary

How Reading Can Help Us Learn To Listen

I’ve not always been a reader. It wasn’t that long ago that I would have been intimidated to read.¹

So, when I decided it was finally time to go to seminary, I knew there was one book I needed to read to help me prepare:

How To Read A Book by Mortimer J. Adler.

I was expecting a book to help me absorb content faster. What I got instead was an education in how to listen.

Here’s how I got to that book…

I always enjoyed school and have always been curious to learn new things. I was intimidated by most books over 150 pages or that were too complicated. And I especially did not want to pursue reading anything that was too academically rigorous.

In truth, I didn’t like reading because I was a slow reader. I still am. I tried speed reading, but I would frequently space out or just stare at the page and have no clue what the author was trying to communicate.

As college wrapped up, I read little to nothing except my Bible for the following decade. The belief that I was not a good reader sank in quite quickly, and I became more and more intimidated to read anything at all.

I really had it in my head that reading just wasn’t for me.

Shortly before our oldest daughter was born, however, a thought occurred to me:

“You’re not going to have as much time to read, and you’ve got a lot of catching up to do. What are you waiting for?”

I don’t know where it came from, but I knew I needed to start reading.

For a while, I was grasping at straws. I read a lot of bad books that didn’t teach me anything and weren’t particularly helpful. But I read a lot – at least relative to my lack of reading the ten years previous.

Eventually, I stumbled into a vein of good books in theology that surprised me. I began to realize I had questions about the world I was living in and could not find satisfactory answers.

Questions like…

What are Christians doing in this political climate?

Why are we always making a big deal over things like abortion rights, but we never seem to mention other pressing social issues?

Is our worship on Sundays still relevant to the rest of our lives?

Why is it offensive to talk about Jesus in public?

I found myself feeling frustrated that I didn’t know what to read to help me unpack questions like these until it finally hit me: this is what going to seminary would help me do (I’m sometimes quite dense, forgive me).

Going back to school seemed insurmountable, yet I knew that being taught by experienced thinkers in the field of theology would help me find a pathway to answering my pressing questions.

But that would mean I would need to read a lot more and probably faster than I had been reading up to that point.

That’s when I remembered Adler’s book.

I don’t even remember where I first heard of the book, but I knew at some point I had to read it.

So in the Spring of 2023, in preparation for my first year at Northern Seminary, I finally set out to read it.

What I thought I was getting when I first picked up the book was instructions on how to speed read. I’m so thankful that this is not what this book is about.

There were certainly some practical tips that helped a distracted reader like me focus on the words.² But what How to Read A Book taught me more than anything was that books are places to come and listen to what others are thinking and seeing in the world.

By listening through reading, one can come to learn things one did not previously know. But to do that, I had to understand the four levels of reading.

Four Levels of Reading

The core of Adler’s book is an explanation of four levels of reading, which, when used together, help the reader listen to the author.

Elementary Reading

This is what my oldest daughter is learning to do right now: Sounding out the words on the page, putting sentences together clearly, and telling me what Gerald said to Piggy.³

Inspectional Reading

At this level of reading, one begins to comprehend the overall structure of a book and obtains the ability to summarize its content. I find even this second level of reading difficult for many people today because it requires a certain amount of synthesizing of broad arguments. When we have a hard time listening, it becomes easy to misrepresent an author at this level of reading.

Analytical Reading

This is where we get more complex in our reading and analyze the content of a book in two stages:

1. Get a sense of the type of subject, summarize a thesis statement, outline its major parts, and define the problems the author is trying to solve

2. Understand the author’s terms/key words, understanding the most important sentences, understanding the arguments and their sequence, and determine which of the author’s problems they’ve successfully solved.

In my estimation, this kind of reading is exceedingly rare in our day. Similar to Inspectional Reading, we don’t give books this kind of time and thought. If we like something, we use it, whether the argument put forth in the book holds weight or not.

I know as a preacher, I’m tempted to find a good quote and rip it from its context to use for an upcoming sermon. I credit the quote appropriately, of course, but it is tempting to just grab soundbites from books instead of reflecting on what the author wishes to communicate.

Syntopical Reading

This is reading that seeks to understand a problem or topic that is not in any book you’ve been reading. It connects thoughts, ideas, and arguments from several books and brings them together into something new. This is the aspect of reading I’ve come to love the most, but it cannot be done without a commitment to the first three levels.

When we read in the ways that Adler outlines in these four levels, we can digest even very complex books that are “above” our current reading level. If we are to grow in our thinking, reading, and writing, this kind of “reading up” is critical. We cannot continue to read those books which are completely understandable to us or that we completely agree with. We learn nothing when we do this. Instead, we need to challenge ourselves to read books that continually push us to understand in a deeper way.

This approach has helped me navigate very complex books and articles over the last two years that I probably would have never picked up if not for what I learned from Adler’s book.

I’ve been emboldened to take on books beyond the assigned reading for class and be adventurous with trying to grasp really intimidating work that is way above my head. Even though I often do not understand those books in their entirety, I have always grown so much as a result.

The reason for this growth, however, is not because I took in more information. Rather, it is because reading in the way outlined by Adler makes one a better listener to other people.

Reading As Revolution

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Harding said in an interview that when he was in his undergraduate education, he made a goal to be a better reader and really understand incredibly intimidating novels like War and Peace.

Then he made a comment that has stuck with me: “No one tries to do that anymore.”

Though a bit of a throwaway line, I found it haunting. As I continued to listen, every sentence, every anecdote, every insight seemed to be illuminated by the words, “no one tries to do that anymore,” as Harding unpacked the craft of learning to use language in new ways.

Harding, like Adler, reminds us that to be a better reader means to give oneself not only better tools for writing, but ultimately better use of language because we have learned to listen to others well.

Our use of language seems to be getting worse as a society. People bow out of difficult conversations, public discourse has become a shouting match, and no one listens to the other. Harding’s insight, that no one tries to read to understand anymore, I contend, is at least part of the problem.

Most of our reading these days is done in the form of quick posts, tweets, captions, and menus at restaurants. But this is only Elementary Level reading. Reading in any of the further levels is what helps us listen. Scrolling and quick takes now dominate the discourse as we’ve become slow to listen and quick to speak.

For those reading this who are regulars in the Substack space, I know I’m preaching to the choir. Many of you have inspired me to be a better reader, writer, and thinker. Yet at the same time, I’m noticing Substack users are increasingly given to the hot take attitude as Notes and other features have become vital if writers here want to create an engaging writing community. (I’m struggling with this honestly, and I’m not sure I like it.)

Those of us, including myself, who are frequently on Substack should consider these deeper levels of reading as practices that help us listen well.

Yet whether you are a regular in the Substack world or you just receive my newsletter via email, the task is the same: learn to listen well.

Pay Attention To Your Own Work

As this essay was brewing in my mind, I was struck by a recent reading in Galatians where Paul writes:

^“Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won’t need to compare yourself to anyone else.” Galatians 6:4

It sounds counterintuitive to what Paul is saying here, but I think part of paying careful attention to our own work is to listen well to what others are saying.

For example, if I read a piece by an influential writer and am thinking the entire time about why I didn’t come up with this idea, or if I am focused on how I’ll never write like this author or that author, then I have not done my work of listening, only comparing.

When I get the focus off of myself, what my response would be, or the point I want to make, and instead proceed with listening, the comparison games fall away. I am no longer caught up in anything other than being present and listening.

If our own work could be a deep attentiveness to what has been written by others, if we could be satisfied by the hard work of reading things we don’t yet comprehend, we would become more grounded people without the need to compare because we have become good listeners and thinkers.

Reading, in this way outlined by Adler, is a revolutionary practice for our cultural moment. It would equip us with skills for critical understanding and cultivate the art of listening in a world that keeps shouting past each other, desperate to be heard.

I hope that reading in this way offers a path towards meaningful connection.

How has reading shaped you to be a better listener?

1. If anything was considered taboo to say on Substack, it might be this.

2. One great tip he offers is putting your thumb and middle finger together with your pointer finger and moving it across each line of the page at a pace you can keep up with and not stopping.

3. If you know, you know.