Book Review:  How to Read, by J. B. Kerfoot,Houghton Mifflin Company, 1916

Subject:  Introduction to the Book and Examining the Title Page Inscription, “Reading is a form of living.”

Blog Entry:  First Blog Entry out of a Series of Seven Blog Entries

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Introduction to the Book

In his book, How to Read, J. B. Kerfoot finds reading a life-long pursuit.  Coupled to this he finds that learning how read is equally a life-long pursuit.  For Kerfoot learning how to read is performing, supervising, and continuing constructive and critical mental activities when reading and he provides an approach, the elements of which I will term “areas of involvement”, of guiding these mental activities in order to meet his objective of helping “…readers to a more intelligent employment of reading for their own individual ends -whatever these may be.”[i]

Kerfoot considers every person unique in their reactions when reading.  It is the uniqueness of each person as well as commonality of human design and purpose at play when reading he is seeking out.  Specifically, he is seeking out the workings of the reader’s mind.  He believes the workings of the reader’s mind are primarily unconscious when reading and he is bringing these workings to conscious recognition in order to help guide the reader in understanding how to read.  Kerfoot’s book is not a scientific work; it is a work to advance an understanding of reading based on common sense observations, inferences, and practices.

My review of Kerfoot’s book will be in multiple parts.  This entry will examine the meaning of the title page inscription of the book, “Reading is a form of living”.  Subsequent entries will review the five areas of involvement in Kerfoot’s constructive and critical orientation on how to read, which are the following: (a) Reading as producing a mental movie; (b)  Handling word meanings; (c) The driving human impulses for reading and the direction reading should take over time; (d)  Searching for relationships of meaning between the internal world of the reader and the external world of the author; and (e)  The intellectual digestion of what has been read.  The final entry will provide the capstone to the to the constructive and critical approach to reading, which is an overall attitude towards reading.

If one reads Kerfoot book, one will find that Kerfoot writes with substance and style.  The fecundity of his thinking about reading and his ability to present his thinking will make one think a lot about what reading and how to guide one’s reading.

Electronic copies of Kerfoot’s book can be found at the HathiTrust Digital Library’s Website, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001166702, and at the Internet Archive Website, https://archive.org/details/howtoread00kerf.  There are reprints of the book available for purchase, as well as an e-book version available for purchase, both of which can be searched for online.  And it is unlikely that a public library would own the original 1916 edition, or for that matter the reprint.  One will have to investigate with their home public library as to whether a copy of the book can be obtained via an interlibrary loan request.

Please note that the italicized words in the quotes taken from the book are the author’s emphasis and are not my added emphasis.

Examining the Meaning of The Title Page Inscription of the Book, “Reading is a Form of Living.”

Kerfoot inscribes the title page of his book with the quote, “Reading is a form of living.”  In the first chapter (Learning to Read) of his book, he starts the chapter with his being a guest at a dinner party and the host raises the question about elementary education as to when the guests learned to read at a young age.  Guests respond with answers as to the age when they mastered the alphabet and word recognition.  Kerfoot believes there is another avenue to this question and when it is his turn to answer he states that he is still learning to read, not in a technical sense, but in the human sense of an ongoing development of himself with his reading and in doing so learning how to read which he believes is rarely spoken about.  This changes the nature of the conversation to the enlightenment of everyone and the conversation goes on to 1 AM in the morning.

Using this as the starting point, Kerfoot establishes that reading is a form of living.  He states that “…We [the dinner party attendees] discovered that reading so far from being a receptive act, is a ‘creative,’ not simply in the more or less cant-sodden ‘artistic sense,’ but biological sense as well.  That it is an active largely automatic, purely personal, constructive functioning.  That it is indeed, a species of anabolism.  In short, that it is a form of living.”[ii]

The word “anabolism” is an important word, though only used once in the book.  Its counterpart in the book is another word as a concept, which is “synthesis.”  Anabolism means: “the phase of metabolism in which simple substances are synthesized into the complex materials of living tissue” (American Heritage Dictionary Online).  To Kerfoot a synthesis of materials happens in the mind during the process of reading.  The reader’s mind has developed current syntheses of understandings, each synthesis formed from strands of the reader’s experiences, thoughts, beliefs, and feelings.  When reading, the reader is using these syntheses either to reconsolidate (revivify) currently formed syntheses, or to form new understandings, new syntheses which reaches right down to the biological level of adding organic new tissues to the brain to enhance one’s intelligence based upon what is being read in a collaboration with the author.  Kerfoot would see syntheses of thought when reading as a higher order function of reading.

Also, chemistry in general plays a part Kerfoot’s book.  He refers to bodily chemistry processes of bodily hunger, appetites, and digestion and he translates these bodily processes into mental chemistry processes happening when reading.  You will see how this works in future blog entries on the book.

The next entry on September 20^th will start the consideration constructive and critical activities that form  Kerfoot’s orientation to reading.  I have termed these activities as areas of involvement when a person is reading.  Each area of involvement is presented in the order it was treated by Kerfoot in his book.  Note that they are not mutually exclusive, and one area overlaps the other, and they are primarily occurring simultaneously when reading, except intellectual digestion which takes place after reading a book, but requires the other areas of involvement to take place.

FOOTNOTES

[i]  Kerfoot, How to Read (1916), 53

[ii] Ibid, 5