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Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

andreasfragner.com

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Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#81

Post by bikenaga »

travisporter wrote: post #50
wenc wrote: post #45

It’s not worth summarizing every book. I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is t…

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

I was using Post-Its to mark pages and add comments, but I stopped after reading some warnings about the glue damaging pages:

https://siarchives.si.edu/blog/post-it-or-not-post-it

http://libraries.ucsd.edu/preservation/postits.html

It's not clear from these articles how soon damage becomes apparent; I haven't noticed any yet in books which had Post-Its. It may not matter if you don't intend your books to have archival value.

I've tried Book Darts for marking pages, and they can also be used like paper clips to hold notes. I write short notes in pencil, but try to avoid dark leads which make marks hard to erase.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#82

Post by o1y32 »

cosou wrote: post #68
donutshop wrote: post #64

I disagree with this. Reading for the sake of summarizing takes the joy away from reading itself. I don't know anybody that'll read just because they want to read more books. If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.

I don't think that this author's point is that we read for the sake of summarizing , per se, but rather that the act of summarizing forces us to engage more thoughtfully with what we've just read. It's that engagement itself that enriches our understanding of the book. By all means enjoy what you're reading while you're reading it!

That's the problem here -- for many books you don't need to develop a deep understanding of the book. Even for books in programming language, I may pick up a book because I am interested in the design of the language or a certain pattern of writing code, not because I want to use the language in the production or master the language, in which case understanding and thinking about pieces is good enough.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#83

Post by 221qqwe »

teodorlu wrote: post #70

No, don't summarize. Remix! Write about your own ideas! Your mind is a living collection of your own ideas, and a history of their significance to your prior life. Not a dead library of pointers to other dead libraries. Books are great. But you shoudn't outsource your brain. The learning happens when you think for yourself. Reading is good. Thinking about what you've read is even better. But don't stop with the summa…

IMHO realistically for most people the ratio between "your own ideas" and everything else should be like 5% or so. If you're exceptionally gifted maybe up to 20%.. (unless you're writing fiction)

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#84

Post by bigtunacan »

TheFreim wrote: post #65
travisporter wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be cultural but I just cannot bring myself write in a book even in pencil. post-its notes for me this is a great idea if I have the discipline

It may help to look at it this way: A book you won't write in is a book that owns you, rather than you owning the book. A book is designed to convey information on the page, writing in your book only adds to and fulfills it's purpose.

Or it is owned by the library

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#85

Post by samanator »

wenc wrote: post #45

It’s not worth summarizing every book. I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is t…

> I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name

That's the same book mentioned in the footnotes of the article.

"How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading Mortimer J. Adler, Charles van Doren"

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/567610.How_to_Read_a_Boo...

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#87

Post by the_af »

Such a proccess- and goal-oriented approach to books doesn't resonate with me at all. Such a mechanical, soulless way of thinking about reading!

Is this for technical, self-help or startup/entreprenurship books? Sure, maybe this works.

I read a lot for fun though. Most of my reading is like this. The books I read are not about "answering questions" and I don't need to "optimize" my reading in any way, either to summarize them or to "process" as many books I can in a year. It's not a contest. It's about the joy of reading.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#88

Post by the_af »

wenc wrote: post #45

It’s not worth summarizing every book. I took a course at UChicago on how to read a book based on Mortimer Adler’s book of the same name, and the takeaway is that the first reading of a book should be a quick one (table of contents, skimming, dipping into pages). Only after a book is shown to have promise are we then to engage in deep reading which not only involves summarizing but also syntopical reading, which is t…

> Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading.

Fully agreed!

> This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice

Disagreed. I read fiction and I tend to re-read a lot, sometimes three or four times. I read for pleasure, so I have the time. Reading is "me" time, and I spend it however I want.

It's only hard to re-read if you have some silly goal like "I must read N books this month". I find such goals worthless.

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#89

Post by pkukkapalli »

dmotz wrote: post #27

I built a tool for myself for the purpose of grokking ideas from books called Emdash [1]. Over the years I've collected reams of highlights from books and articles but until recently, rarely reviewed or absorbed them. The core of this app uses on-device ML to show related passages with similar ideas from other books you've read, and I find that going broad and exploring concepts from different angles really helps in…

This is such a neat tool. The presentation is very pleasant. Is the intention to have the snippets/notes be shareable in the future? I actually made a similar tool [1] (though your's is much more complete), which I use to quickly find passages and relevant text when I'm blogging. And, I was thinking it might be really useful to have highly rated notes on a snippet available so that you can get someone else's insight on a particular selection. I'll give this a more in depth look later when I want to write another blog post.

[1]: https://ishmael.app

Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books

#90

Post by OmarShehata »

the_af wrote: post #87

Such a proccess- and goal-oriented approach to books doesn't resonate with me at all. Such a mechanical, soulless way of thinking about reading! Is this for technical, self-help or startup/entreprenurship books? Sure, maybe this works. I read a lot for fun though. Most of my reading is like this. The books I read are not about "answering questions" and I don't need to "optimize" my reading in any way, either to summa…

I had a similar reaction to a lot of the language in this post, but I think there's something to it here that is still valuable even for just the joy of reading.

For me it's important that I am paying attention as I read. I used to rarely re-read books, and have started re-reading my favorite ones, and it's often surprising to me how many interesting ideas I missed, or maybe just forgot about. I enjoy talking to friends about books too and I find that helps me explore the ideas more deeply. I've recently started trying writing up my takeaways for books I've enjoyed, partially as something to send friends to talk about with or try convince them to read the book too so we can talk about it.

I think the caveat here is that it's totally valid to not do any of these things if you are enjoying whatever process you have. I just appreciate being exposed to this idea because it's increased my enjoyment of my own reading.

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