Advise for Students of History

I've been reading How to Study History by Norman Cantor and Richard Schneider and ran across some good advice for the historian in all of us:

If you are a beginner, the reading of one secondary book in history each week should be enough--but just barely enough--to enable you to build up the necessary skills of reading quickly, which include finding the thesis of a book in a few minutes, learning to recognize the devices of various fundamental interpretations, and finally storing in your memory some approximate awareness of the contents and subjects covered in the book so that you can use it later as a reference.... To be sure, once the pressures of graduate work ease and the new pressures of writing, teaching, and having a deeper and closer interest in primary sources take over, the professional scholar's reading of secondary sources will decrease with time. But even so, most good scholars still try to read at least one secondary source each week and to keep up with the periodical literature, and in general try to stay abreast of the literature of their own fields of interest....

The first aim in reading any secondary should be to determine as soon as possible what the main point of the book is--to find the central conclusions the book is trying to prove, and to recogonizethe historiographical point of view represented ... i.e. the assumptions and value judgements upon which the author bases his conclusions....

To find the main point of a book, you should read the introduction, the first chapter, and the last chapter before you read any other part of the book....

With the main point as a central focus, everything else to be discovered by the student as he reads the book will have a frame of reference.

The authors end the first part of the book with these observations:

The one theme that has recurred ... has been the need for the active perception, for creative and imaginative interpretation in the use of all types of historical materials. Neither primary sources nor secondary sources will offer any significantly meaningful insights to a passive reader who seeks merely to recognize their contents. But the student who has acquired the basic principles of anlyzing sources, and who through diligent study learns by practice and by observing the work of other historians to apply such priciples fluently, will find hismelf fully prepared and well informed for the next major step in his development--the wrinting of his own original historical papers.

Don't we all learn by imitation? And then we learn to develop our own voice, point of view, interests, and come up with something ours.