How to Read a Book and What It Means in the Age of AI - Aniket Rai
You learned to read when you were six.
Nobody taught you anything about reading after that.
In 1940, Mortimer Adler argued that reading isn't one skill. It's an amalgamation of four, stacked on top of each other, and formal education stops after the first one.
Most of us have spent our adult lives reading at a level we were never actually trained for, and quietly assuming everyone else has it figured out.
How to Read a Book is the classic book to fixing that. It's sold millions of copies, yet it's caught the dust of time and most people today haven't heard about this book!
And amongst those who do have it in their bookshelf; most people who own it haven't finished it. I was one of them. I read ~100 pages five years ago and quit.
Then this year I came back to it AND used the book's own method to read the book. That's what this session is about.
What we'll cover:
→ The four levels of reading: and an honest diagnosis of which one you're actually operating at
→ The 15-minute book interview: Adler's inspectional method for deciding whether a book deserves your time, before you've spent ten hours finding out. You'll run it live, on a book from your own shelf.
→ The four questions every serious book owes you an answer to; and why two of them are off-limits until you've answered the other two
→ The rule of fair criticism: "you may not say 'I agree' or 'I disagree' until you can say 'I understand'". Written in 1940. Describes our timelines better than anything published this year.
→ Syntopical reading: how to read four books as a single argument, in a breakout with other readers
→ Reading Books in the age of AI: three of Adler's four levels have just been automated by AI. I'll show you which one hasn't, why it can't be, and what I think that means for anyone who reads seriously in 2026.
This is a working session, not a lecture. There are two polls, a live exercise where you'll inspect a real book from your own shelf, and a breakout room. Come with a book you own and have never read OR left it midway.
Everyone who registers gets: a Reader's Companion afterwards — the full fifteen rules, the marking system, the genre-by-genre adjustments, four starter reading stacks, and the AI prompt templates I actually use. And oh yes, did I mention the Recording Link too?
Who this is for: anyone who buys more books than they finish. Anyone who's ever felt guilty about abandoning one. Anyone who reads a lot and suspects they're not getting as much out of it as they should.
Who this isn't for: people looking for a speed-reading hack. Adler is explicitly against that, and so am I.
About the Presenter
I'm Aniket Rai. I run cohort based learning programs as passion projects.
Currently in 3rd Cohort of Build to Learn AI.
I also run accountability cohorts called "DO 100 HARD" for the last 100 days of a year between 22nd Sept to 31st Dec.
And I ran 25 Cohorts of "The ReadARs Club" b/w 2019 to 2024 which helped 250+ people form a daily reading habit.
I'm a Distinguished Toastmaster and I've been writing about reading books and habits on LinkedIn since 2022.