Writing Detailed Book Summaries

When I read a book with the intention of summarizing it, I put unnecessary pressure on my shoulders: instead of feeling and immersing myself in the book, I’m already thinking about what to do with it. It’s counter-productive.

Taking detailed notes is typically a scholarly approach: you have to go slowly, scrutinize every word, sentence, and paragraph, in the hope of digging some gems. But I’m not like that. 

I love devouring books, flipping through pages, and immersing myself in the object of the book rather than in the book itself. I need to butcher a quantity of material and learn through experimentation, rather than spending several hours on a single chapter. It’s my sole remedy against boredom and procrastination.

In my experience, it’s easier to read and summarize 5 chapters of 5 different books in a day than to fight through 5 chapters of the same book. This cross-reading habit also seems to improve my creativity, but I’ll need more rigorous data to verify my hypothesis.

In non-fiction, reading the table of contents is also a huge time-saver. Summarizing books for Sipreads, I noticed that 80% of the added value of most books lies in 20% of the words, often in the title or the conclusion of each chapter. The rest is storytelling and page filling, not necessarily the most interesting part of the book when you take a pragmatic problem-first approach to reading, and time is more valuable after all. There are very few books worth studying, and even less worth remembering. In fact, I probably won’t remember 90% of the books I’m reading in 6 months: there is just too much going on!