How to Read a Book: The Ultimate Guide There are four rules to Analytical Reading Classify the book according to kind and subject matter. State what the whole book is about with the utmost brevity. Enumerate its major parts in their order and relation, and outline these parts as you have outlined the whole. Define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. You’ll probably notice that while those sound pretty easy, they involve a lot of work. Luckily the inspectional reading you’ve already done has primed you for this. After an inspectional read, you will understand the book and the author’s views. But that doesn’t mean you’ll understand the broader subject. To do that, you need to use comparative reading to synthesize knowledge from several books on the same subject.