Art & Creativity Quote by Mortimer Adler

Adler’s line needles a modern status game before it even had a name: the performance of being “well-read.” The sly reversal in “get through” turns reading from consumption into exposure. We like to imagine the book as an inert object we conquer page by page; Adler insists the real risk runs the other direction. A good book is a kind of solvent. If it “gets through to you,” it breaches your self-protective habits: your opinions, your shortcuts, the comforting sense that you already know what you believe.

The intent is quietly polemical. Adler, a key popularizer of “great books” education and a co-author of How to Read a Book, was writing against both passive skimming and the industrial mentality applied to culture: speed, volume, measurable output. His sentence is engineered to make tallying feel childish. “How many” still appears, but the metric is inverted; the only count that matters is the number of works that alter you.

There’s subtext, too, about humility and effort. Letting a book “get through” isn’t the same as being moved in a vague way. It implies re-reading, argument, annotation, wrestling with claims that don’t flatter you. Adler’s philosophy here is less about reverence for classics than about an ethic of attention: reading as a practice that demands you change, not merely confirm your taste.

In a culture of feeds, summaries, and “10 books successful people read,” the line lands as a rebuke. It suggests the truly educated person isn’t the one who collects titles, but the one who has been productively rearranged by a few.