Taking a quick scan of my bookshelf, I estimate the average academic history book is approximately 2,464 pages long, about half of which is 8-point typeface footnotes. This raises a critical question. We can make an incredible resource like the AskHistorians booklist, but how are actual human beings supposed to make use of it?

Fortunately, there is a SUPER TOP SECRET strategy to bring the realm of the immortals to our level. For this week's Monday Methods, I'm reviving one of my all-time most-linked posts:

##How to Read an Academic Book:

Sometimes, you're so deep into into a term paper or a topic of research that you just have to sit down, grind it out, and read the darn book. Sometimes, you're hunting through the index of different books to find information on one narrow topic. Very, very occasionally, an author's prose is good enough and the subject interesting enough that you want to read the whole book.

This is not for those times.

When you have a massive pile of history reading to get through, especially when you need to understand the major arguments in scholarship on a specific topic quickly, this is the accepted strategy.

0. What do you need to know?

Author, position in historiography (why this book needs to exist), main argument (thesis), major body of sources, methodology, brief outline of how argument is developed, brief notes on your assessment of the work (does it make sense, did the author mishandle the sources, where did it go too far, where didn't it go far enough, etc)

1. Read book reviews.

Try searching Google for [author last name] [title] review. Amazon and Goodreads are not your destination. You want reviews from peer-reviewed academic journals, which will in most cases be accessible through a database like JSTOR, ProQuest, or Cambridge. There are some fantastic free sources of reviews, too: H-net.org and the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (for relevant topics) can be really helpful. You might also turn up something good and in-depth from a scholar's blog!

You can also search databases internally, but Google (regular Google) is pretty darn good at universal search in this case.

If you don't have access to academic databases, you might get lucky and get the beginning of the review visible for free via preview on (at least, to my knowledge) Cambridge, Project Muse, and JSTOR.

Not all academic book reviews are good ones, but a good one should give you an idea of the book's thesis, some key arguments within it or points of evidence, maybe a general outline (this is rarer than I'd like), perhaps some remarks on where the book fits in to the overall pattern of scholarship, and maybe an assessment of its strengths and weaknesses as a piece of history. Shockingly, these are exactly the things that you will want to take away from the book.

I like to take notes on the reviews I read.

2. Read the introduction. Take notes.

If you're lucky, the author will use the introduction to tell you the book's argument, how they will develop it (outline of the book), their methodology or analytical framework (deep reading? applied feminist theory?), and discuss their main body of sources. For anthologies, that is, collections of essays by different authors, a good editor will include a brief summary of each essay. That happens less often than it should. Typically (though not always), you will get some good insight into the overall theme of the anthology and that topic's significance to the historical narrative of the time period.

3. Read the conclusion

The conclusion should reiterate the introduction or take the story in a new direction. Especially if the introduction is weak, you might get some good information or quotations that you can use in a literature review paper or something from the conclusion.

4. Write down the table of contents

To help you get a quick impression of the book's argument in 3 months when you're coming back to these notes, you're going to make a quick outline of the central point of each chapter. (If the introduction did the work for you, awesome.) That will let you see, at a glance, the roughest path of the argument's development.

5. Read the first couple and last couple pages of each chapter.

Especially if the book proceeds as a "collection of chapters" rather than a united narrative, you will get a mini-intro and mini-conclusion on the topic in those pages. (Sometimes you'll have to read past an opening anecdote, but then, those are often interesting and worth the read. Don't forget--you like history; that's why you're doing this.)

6. Optional: actually read one of the chapters through

This can be if one catches your eye, seems like it could be pretty helpful, or to get an idea for how the author handles the specific body of sources they use.

7. Bonus! If you have a stack of books on the same topic, read the most recent one first.

If you are very lucky, one of the more recent authors will provide you with a historiography or literature review: that is, a brief summary of game-changing books or articles on the same or a similar topic. If you get really, really lucky, you will get enough of an idea from later books that you can more or less skip or skim even more briefly the earlier ones.

8. Perform some kind of synthesis.

You might try writing a one-page "review" hitting up the key points from #0; you might try explaining the book out loud to your pet or a (bribed) friend. Just do something to bring the scattered bits together in your mind, even if briefly.

Super extra special advice for graduate students

If your class has been assigned a whopload of reading, which it has, strategize with each other over who skips which reading. Make sure that at least two people have covered each text, so there can be conversation. Don't. Ever. All. Abandon. The. Same. Book. It will go...poorly.