The Art of Reading
"We can roughly define what we mean by the art of reading as follows: the process whereby a mind, with nothing to operate on but the symbols of the readable matter, and with no help from outside, elevates itself by the power of its own operations. The mind passes from understanding less to understanding more. The skilled operations that cause this to happen are the various acts that constitute the art of reading. . . .
"We have shown that activity is the essence of good reading, and that the more active reading is, the better it is."
(Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, How to Read a Book. Simon and Schuster, 1972)