By Gary Topping–
Last week a historian friend told me of a girl who wanted to major in history at his college, but who did not like to read, and who kept trying to find courses that did not require reading. He pointed out to her that the study of history consists mostly of reading, and advised her to look for another major. He was right, of course. I suspect the same could be said of most other fields in the humanities, but since I’m a historian, I can speak most directly to that.
We students of history do two types of reading. As undergraduates, we read mostly to gain factual knowledge, and that means that when we read a book, we pretty much read every page, just as we would read a novel or any other type of book. But when we get to graduate school, it is assumed that we have already gained a basic factual knowledge of a subject, and now we are reading the interpretive literature: what do historians say those facts mean, and what are the most important casual forces? At that point, we shift to another type of reading, in which we are most interested in the book’s basic thesis, and the evidence by which the author supports the thesis. We are no longer reading every page; we are just trying to “get the guts out of the book,” as a political science professor put it during my first year of graduate school.
I suspect that each of us develops his or her own technique for doing that, but however we get there, we have to do it, for the volume of reading required is far too great to be poring over every page. When I was in graduate school, we were expected to read a book every day. When I stood for my comprehensive oral examinations at the end of my coursework, I had to submit a bibliography of at least one hundred books that I was prepared to be examined on, and of course I had read many more than that.
These days, with those intense times of examination preparation many years behind me, I still read for factual information and I also read just for enjoyment, and in those instances, of course I read every page. But I also read a lot of books where I’m just interested in the author’s thesis and his sources, and in those cases I revert to my graduate school days of “getting the guts out of the book.” My wife, although she herself has a graduate degree in the humanities, is often amazed at how fast I can get in and out of a book. Here’s how I do it:
I concentrate on those parts of the book where the author is most likely to summarize his case. I start with the table of contents, where I learn what the chronological or topical limits of the book are. Then I read the preface and the introduction, where he explains what he is about to do. I may read the first chapter or perhaps another chapter that seems to contain his most pregnant findings. From there, I jump to the conclusion, where he summarizes what he has just attempted to do. I scrutinize his footnotes and bibliography to see what sources he has used and whether he is aware of the previous literature on the subject.
That’s it. I’m done. And I’ll bet I haven’t spent more than an hour or two on it, or at the most maybe half a day. At that point I could write a formal review of the book, I could discuss it intelligently at a faculty meeting or a cocktail party, and I could incorporate it into a formal classroom lecture. I have pretty much as good a mastery of the book as I would have if I had spent a week or two reading every page.
If you’ve never done this, you won’t learn it overnight. I didn’t. It takes practice and it takes flexibility, because different authors have different styles, and different books have different formats. But if you persevere, you’ll find that you’re becoming a pretty well-read person in a pretty short period of time. It can really deepen and enrich your life.
