How to Read a Book (and More) with AI

How to Read a Book (and More) with AI:
Tools for You and Your Students:
An "AI Essentials" Webinar with Steve Hargadon

OVERVIEW: 

Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book (first written in 1940 and revised in 1972 with Charles Van Doren) has been a bestseller for decades, shaping how we approach nonfiction and inspiring countless readers to read differently. It’s an enduring classic, but let’s be honest: its dense, scholarly tone can feel daunting and almost too academic, especially for younger students or anyone struggling to find motivation to read.

Adler’s core insight was brilliant, and for me, it’s really all we need to communicate to help someone build a completely different relationship with books: treat a book like a conversation with the author. Most authors don’t make that easy, since their aim is often to organize everything they know into a comprehensive and structured framework. But if we were to sit down with the author and talk about the material, we would have a back-and-forth, question-driven conversation, allowing us to learn about the topic in a more natural way. Imagine having two or three hours with a great thinker to do that—we'd learn so much!

But only a rare few authors (think Malcolm Gladwell) can weave their ideas into a story that pulls us along the way a conversation would. So what Adler (and Van Doren) did was give us a method for turning a book into that kind of conversational experience: browse the table of contents, peek at the index, and skim to catch the book’s essential ideas—then jump into sections that spark our interest, deciding if it’s worth the hours of our time to dive deep. It’s such a smart approach and makes that pile of books we've been meaning to get to seem much less daunting.

Now, enter AI (actually, large language models—LLMs). To suggest that this is a dramatic and historic change in engaging with content and information is not hyperbole. LLMs change the game completely. Reading with an LLM "partner" invites us to go from passive recipients into active participants with information—whether it’s a book, video, or article. We can start by asking for a detailed summary of that 400-page book or that two-hour YouTube video—incredible. Then, in a matter of minutes, we can know how deep we want to go, and we can explore the ideas (or related ones) with our AI reading partner: Is this book considered authoritative? What have people liked and not liked about its content? Who else has explored these same ideas?

It’s hard to overstate what a game-changer this is for ideas and information. Back in 1952, as editor of the 52-volume Great Books of the Western World series from Encyclopaedia Britannica, Adler wrote The Great Conversation, an introductory volume arguing that these works—philosophy, science, literature—weren’t just dusty relics but part of an active dialogue on life’s big and timeless questions. He saw this conversation as the backbone of a liberal education, one that anyone could join by engaging with these texts, and a way to democratize learning. It was a passionate manifesto for why these conversations matter.

This webinar, "How to Read a Book (and More) with AI," is a chance to explore how LLMs fulfill Adler’s dream in ways he couldn’t imagine. We’ll start with a half-hour presentation, then shift to a community discussion to share with each other your ideas and the AI tools you are using for yourself and (if applicable) with students.

DATE: Friday, April 4th, 2025 at 2:00 pm US - Eastern Time