To read a book in one hour requires a particular kind of book. It works for most scholarly books, especially in history and social science, the denser the better. It works less well for books in philosophy or for heavily argument driven texts that require the reader to follow along (I would not recommend trying to learn calculus in this manner). More importantly, it requires the apparatus that a scholarly book gets when it is published—i.e. it does not work for dissertations, drafts, self-published works or poorly-published ones. Indeed, a well-crafted scholarly book is fantastic machine, one that can be readily approached, understood, extended and critiqued. In this era of the crisis of scholarly publishing, it seems to me that presses should be doing a lot more to indicate that they can turn an otherwise messy manuscript filled with hard-to-find but good ideas into a scholarly hot rod tricked out with everything necessary to teach generations upon generations, connect up scholarly communities, and parse out complex topics into loadable modules of delicious knowledge. Publishing a scholarly book is not about making it available—it is about making it readable, and this is what you pay for, or should be paying for anyways. If you can follow these steps, especially with a work of history or ethnography, then the book is a well-produced scholarly work.
How to
read a book in 1 hour.
- Read the whole book at once: Start by flipping through it, read the
TOC, the preface and forward. if there are any, look for
subheadings and for a general sense of whether the book
has internal divisions (parts, chapters, subheadings
that do not appear in the TOC), and whether it has a
conclusion or other kinds of sections, interludes, or
breaks in the text. Browse the notes to see if they
contain merely references or extended parts of the
argument. If the book does not contain an index, you can
stop here: the only thing left to do is sit down and
read from cover to cover, as slow or as fast as you
permit yourself.
- Turn to the index.
- You will make two lists. Begin by looking for the
largest entries, those indented with sub-headings, and
lots of page references. Write them all down: people,
places, things, concepts. In a normal academic tome
(300ps) there should be anywhere between 10 and 30 pages
of index, so this list can range from 5 terms to more
like 100. But really, start with the longest and most
detailed, which should yield a good list. This is your
list of the main subjects and problems of the book.
- Now go through the index again, and look for entries
that do not have subheadings, but have more than 3-4
page entries. Some authors go crazy with the
subheadings, so the first list might be a lot longer
than the second, other authors (or index makers) are
content to list everything once, with page refs. You
have to exercise some judgment here. If your first list
is very long, then for your second list pick out those
entries which are not people, institutions or events,
but analytic or conceptual designators—i.e. look for
entries that are analytic sounding: “assemblages”
“neo-liberal shenaniganism” “trading zones” “network
forums” etc. If your first list is very short, it very
well might already contain these terms, and the second
list will be a list of people, places or things that
reappear throughout the book.
Note at this point that you have two lists of terms which you can use in class to remind you of the details, even if you haven’t yet read the book. The index is the Platonic ideal of the text, use it.
- With your lists in hand, turn to the Introduction.
But don’t start at the beginning. Read the last few
pages of the introduction, where most likely there will
be a series of paragraphs here dealing with the content
of each of the chapters. Read carefully, noting which
chapters relate to which entries on your two lists. If
your author has chosen to express their individuality
here and forgo such a list, you can wing it by looking
at the beginning and end of each of the chapters to see
whether the author gives you a hint there.
Note that you still haven’t “read” very much yet, but that you should already have a deepening sense of the main themes of the book, and a map, complete with precise coordinates of where to find the main arguments and the main subjects of the book.
- Now read the introduction carefully. Make sure you
are clear what the author thinks the main arguments and
sub-arguments are, and that you could reconstruct them
if asked, even if you can’t offer any details or
reasoning behind them.
- If there is a conclusion, read that carefully too. I
know this sounds like cheating, but it isn’t. It is a
rare scholarly book that demands of its reader that they
wait until the end for the argument to make sense.
{Aside: Indeed, many graduate students make this mistake
in writing, assuming that it is necessary to defer and
defer and defer until you get into the very heart of the
most detailed detailage before revealing the a-ha! of
the argument. No no no, give it up, right at the
beginning and let the reader work through your example
to convince themselves you are correct!} Read the
conclusion for how it tries to tie up the arguments
presented in the text (which you haven’t yet read) with
the promises made in the introduction. Note especially
if the author makes clear what the significance
of the argument is beyond the text, which will help you
care about the details.
- Now return to your two lists. The shorter of these
two lists (the one with the analytic entries) should now
give you a very good guide to where the theoretical meat
of the book lays. Having read the intro and conclusion,
you can now turn directly to each of those sections (you
have the technology!) and “read from the inside out.”
The longer list (filled with people, places and things)
in turn gives you a good sense of where the data is, and
how it is distributed across the chapters (if you go
back and look at all the subheadings in the index).
“Reading from the inside out” means literally starting
in medias res, looking for the precise places
where the author has made it a point to connect theory
and data. Read the paragraphs leading up to it and
following it. Note the references to empirical material
marshaled or referred to, and decide which of those
things you need to read more about—turn to list two, and
find the places where you can follow up. After running
through the entries of the shorter list, you will have
read a fair amount of the most important parts
of the book.
Note that this approach is fractal in nature: with a good index you can make progressively longer and more focused lists that give you “random access” to the text, and allow you to dig deeper and deeper until you approximate the actual cover to cover manner in which a text seems (wrongly I hope I have convinced you) that it was meant to be read.
Needless to say, this is a strategy that works only for good books, and for books that are primarily dense with detailed empirical material, which most histories, ethnographic and other forms of social science research usually are. It is less useful for philosophical works, completely useless for books that do not have indices (like much work in French! damn them!), and it will only confirm the badness of a bad book. However, if you are faced, as many students are, with reading as many as 4-5 books in one week, this is one way to avoid ending up in a class with a vague sense of what a book is about and a detailed understanding of only the first 30 or so pages. I am of course curious to hear from people how this approach fails.