The well-educated mind

I have read more books about books than I would like to admint. One the reasons I do this is to save time. I don't like to read the wrong books or read more than I should of bad book.

Like any good book about book The Well-Educated Mind guides the reader to establishing better reading habits and skills. It points the reader in the direciton of reading the best books and gives them encouragement.

This book draws on the best of books about books. My favorite in Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book. So in away The Well Educated Mind is a book about books about books.

Putting it together in a different way and adding her own experince while updating some of the outdated or skipping over those parts is the main contriubtion this book brings.

For young reader in 2020 this is a good place to start on the quest of reading for self improvement or for reading books about books.

I read this book as the organizing preamble to a meetup book group. In that capacity, it was a pretty useful guide. After all, how many book groups have you been to that devolve into gab fests for people who eventually don't even bother to read the book and focus solely on the pot luck portion of the occasion? So, stars for the idea behind the book and for encouraging people to focus on the tools necessary for reading a text closely and studying without a professional guide.

That's where the stars end, however. Susan Wise Bauer comes off as a sort of arrogant, evangelical, anti-education, yutz. Eventually, the condescension comes to a head and you just want to put the book down and flip her off. Look, if you didn't go to college and for whatever reason (there are many) you can't go to college, the ideas in this book (there are like 3 solid ideas that take about as many pages to explain) are useful. It's worthwhile to gain the confidence that you are reading "correctly." For everyone else, even those of us who had a pretty good high school education, there is absolutely nothing of value here. You get a few obvious points about reading carefully, then you get her strange and often questionable list of books to read (Mein Kampf? Really? Of all the books to choose from? Was that important?). The majority of the pages are dedicated to horribly reductive synopses of her list of book.

Also there's no index, or pages listing her recommended reading lists by title only. You pretty much have to slog through her pages of commentary to see which books in each category of literature you would like to read. No thanks.

Overall, I would NOT recommend this book, though there may be some cases when parts of it are useful.