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

Subject:  Sixth Area of Involvement Constructive and Critical Orientation:  The Intellectual Digestion of What is Read

This is the sixth blog entry on reviewing How to Read, by J. B. Kerfoot.  It will consider the fifth and final area of involvement of Kerfoot’s constructive and critical approach of learning how to read.  This area of involvement is the intellectual digestion that happens after a book is read.

The blog entry on September 29, 2023 considered the fourth area of involvement in Kerfoot’s constructive and critical orientation to learning how to read of looking at how the reader compares their understanding of what they are reading to the author’s presentation.  The blog entry on September 26, 2023 considered the third area of involvement of the driving impulses for reading and the direction reading should take.  The blog entry of September 22, 2023 considered the second area of involvement of handling word meanings.  The blog entry of September 20, 2023 considered the first area of involvement of reading as producing a mental movie.  And, the blog entry of September 15, 2023 gave an introduction to the book and considered the meaning of the title page inscription of the book, “Reading is a form of living.”

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

 Area of Involvement:  The Intellectual Digestion of What is Read

This area of involvement is covered in Chapter Seven, “Intellectual Digestion.”

Once a book is read its full meaning will take time to absorb because it goes through a process of thinking and reflection in the mind.  Kerfoot calls this intellectual digestion and intellectual digestion’s primary by-product is the formation and retention of memories.

Kerfoot likens the process of intellectual digestion to the bodily chemistry of the digestion of food.  Intellectual digestion becomes mental chemistry at work.  One takes in mental food when reading.  The reader has chewed and swallowed the mental food and now intellectual digestion takes place. Mentally, it then becomes the process, much of it unconscious, of breaking down the mental food into its components and accepting what is of nutritive value as mental sustenance. The mental sustenance retained are in the form memories.  The most important memories to be retained are those relationships between the life inside one’s self and the life outside one’s self gained when reading. These established relationships either help one to explain the world, or help one in relating to the world.  Overall, the established relationships have the power to be called upon from memory and when called upon have explanatory, emotional, and imaginative powers that are relevant and germane for understanding the past, for understanding the here-and-now, and for understanding the future.

It should be noted that what is established in memory is not the sum of what one reads, but what happens to one when they read-what is of value in responding to life and therefore worth retaining from one’s reading.  It is the quality not quantity of memories retained.  Memory is not a storage house for all sorts of information and ideas whose value is only that they are there and have no real enduring future in forming syntheses of understanding and meaning when reading. To quote Kerfoot:  “What really counts is the sum of what happens in us through reading-the ultimate outcome of those ‘concrete’ combings and ‘chemical transformation’ by which new tissues are added to our intelligence and new cells to our understanding.  What counts is not the quantity of our intellectual food, but the products of our intellectual digestion.”[i]

Then memory, intellectual digestion, becomes furthering and making permanent key understandings between the life within one’s self and the life outside of one’s self.  It is moving from reacting to these relationships while reading to now putting key relationships into memory for further use.  For memory formation the same rules need to be applied as with “subsidiary curiosities” but now after reading the book.  The reader now is in the mode of thinking about matters after reading and to quote Kerfoot,  “Never fail to follow out, to the extent of your aroused interest, any subsequent promptings of inquiry into their meaning for you, or into your feelings toward them.  And, other things being equal, force yourself to give the right of way to curiosities as to your antagonisms and your dislikes, rather than to curiosities as to your acquiescences and your likings.”[ii]

The next and final blog entry on Kerfoot’s book will be on an overall attitude when reading that will focus all the areas of involvement of his constructive and critical method of reading.

FOOTNOTES

[i] How to Read, 1916, 206

[ii] Ibid, 220