How to Read a Book was first published in 1940 and revised in 1972 with Charles Van Doren, and it remains the most thorough manual in English on how to read a difficult book on purpose. Adler's four levels — elementary, inspectional, analytical, syntopical — are still the right vocabulary. But the book is silent on questions that have become harder since 1972: what attention is, why our culture stopped giving books the time they need, and what the older traditions of reading were doing that we've lost.
The three below take the question outward. Read in this order, they're the modern apparatus around Adler's older technique.
The Reading Mind — Daniel T. Willingham
Willingham is a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, and The Reading Mind is the best one-volume account of what the brain actually does when it reads. He explains how letter recognition becomes word recognition becomes meaning, why fluent reading depends on background knowledge more than on technique, and why "speed reading" — the thing many people think they want — does not exist in the way it is sold.
"You can't read for meaning unless you already know most of what the text is about."
Adler tells you how to read carefully. Willingham tells you what reading carefully is, mechanically, in your head. The combination is unusually useful. Skip the chapters on K–12 instruction if you're an adult reader; the rest is gold.
How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division — Elif Shafak
Shafak is a novelist who writes essays on why fiction matters in a culture saturated with information. This short book — under a hundred pages — is the strongest contemporary case for sustained reading as an act of moral attention. Her argument is that the algorithmic feed has trained a generation to skim, and that the cost is not literacy but empathy: we stop being able to inhabit other minds.
"In an age that prizes speed, depth is a form of resistance."
Pair with Daniel Mendelsohn's essay collections (especially "Ecstasy and Terror," 2019, or any of his New Yorker pieces from the last decade) for a complementary case: that close reading, like close listening, is a discipline that has to be re-learned each generation.
On Writing — Stephen King
This is the surprise on the list. King's memoir of his craft is half autobiography, half writing manual — and the writing manual is the best single text on how prose actually works. The chapters on dialogue, paragraph length, adverbs, and the second draft will change how you read sentences. You start to see the choices a writer made. You stop accepting bad prose passively. You read better because you understand, finally, what the writer was doing with each word.
King is not a literary writer in the snobbish sense. He is, however, a careful one, and On Writing is the gateway drug to reading sentences the way a writer reads them — which is, in the end, what Adler was after.
If you want to go deeper
Auerbach wrote Mimesis in Istanbul during the Second World War, in exile from Nazi Germany, mostly from memory because he did not have access to a research library. The book is twenty essays on close readings of Western literature, from Homer to Virginia Woolf, each beginning with a single passage and reading it carefully enough to draw out what the prose is doing with reality. The Odysseus scar chapter — the first — has been called the single greatest piece of literary criticism in the twentieth century.
This is not a book to read instead of Adler. It is the book that shows you, in practice, what Adler's "analytical reading" looks like when a great reader does it. Read one chapter a month. By the end you will read differently.