![[4-levels.png]] According to Mortimer Adler, in "How to Read a Book"[^1], there are four levels of reading. 1. **Elementary Reading** - as you are taught in school. Make sense of the page. 2. **Inspectional Reading** - where you *systematically* skim the contents and headings, and *superficially* read in a quick way. You are trying to decide if you want to properly read the book. 3. **Analytical Reading** - where you do the real work, do a lot of note taking / marginalia, and make sense of it. Hard work. 4. **Syntopic Reading** - where you work to synthesise material across a topic, by comparing and contrasting different authors, papers and ideas. I read a lot of non fiction in my interest areas, and generally my first pass will be to inspect. I take extensive notes and highlights in books which I rate. Sometimes I will make a full book note. Of course, having a book note is valuable, but it's far more useful to organise thinking into [[writing atomic notes improves thinking|atomic notes]] that can be referenced later. As a result, I find that [[practicing syntopic reading accelerates learning]] best. [^1]: [[Adler - How to Read a Book]]