A Socratic reading companion
Reading hard books takes real attention — and skimming steals that attention from you. Readforth walks you through a text the old way: Grammar first, then Logic, then Rhetoric. A Socrates-style teacher works the passage with you, asking questions until you've actually seen what's there. Then you move on.
Serious books demand attention most of us don't have. You open Meditations or The Federalist Papers or On War, read a few pages on the treadmill, realize you haven't absorbed any of it, and put it back on the shelf. Next year you start over.
Skimming isn't reading. Summaries are someone else's reading. The book gives itself up only when you actually work it — and almost no tool on the market helps you do that.
The Trivium is the 1,500-year-old three-stage discipline for reading something difficult. We run every passage through it, with a Socratic teacher who won't let you hand-wave.
Before you interpret, you read. What terms does the author use? What claims? If you can't point at the page, you can't argue about what it means.
What's the conclusion? What's the premise? Where does the inference lean? Could you reconstruct it well enough that the author would recognize it?
What is the passage trying to get you to feel, remember, live by? Why this phrasing and not another? How does it land in your life today?
You open a book. You read a short passage — one argumentative unit, a single move the author makes. Then Socrates asks you what it actually said. Here's a sketch of how that opens, on the first paragraph of The Art of War:
He never gives you the answer. If you were vague, he presses. If you were sharp, he moves you forward. You earn it, one short exchange at a time.
When you finish a unit, Readforth doesn't hand you an AI-generated summary to file away. You write three short paragraphs — Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric — in your own voice. Socrates can review what you wrote and point at gaps, but he doesn't fill them for you. Writing is thinking; the AI doesn't get to do the thinking on your behalf.
Those paragraphs accumulate, unit by unit, into a notebook that reads like the journal of someone who actually finished the book. Because you did.
Highlight any passage while you read. Add a tag — say, authority or fear or ethos — and a short note on why it matters to you. Every quote you tag with the same word becomes a thread that spans every book on your shelf.
Six weeks in, your authority thread might gather sentences from Sun Tzu, Aurelius, and Hamilton. Each one stays linked to its original passage. Each one is shareable as its own clean URL. Your reading life finally compounds.
The text mode pairs the passage with the dialogue side by side — perfect for a quiet hour at the desk.
Native iPhone app with voice mode. The passage plays in a warm narrator voice; you answer Socrates with a tap and your voice. AirPods in, work it out outdoors.
0 foundational texts on the house — full Socratic dialogue, full notebook, full hands-free voice mode included.
Free with three foundational books, no card. Scholar unlocks everything for $11.99/month after a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime.
Try it without a card. Three hand-picked books with the full experience — every feature, just a smaller catalog.
The full library, hands-free voice mode, and uploads. 7-day free trial, then $11.99/month.
Three books, full features, and a notebook waiting for the words you haven't written yet.
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