If you don't enjoy writing summaries, I recommend just getting drinks with your buddies and telling them about the interesting stuff you read.
I do this regularly and it works great.
Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
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Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#92Such 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…
Totally agree. Although there is something to be said for having better retention as it will only aid your enjoyment of future reading on the subject.
I recommend getting drinks with friends and telling them all about the interesting stuff you read.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#93It’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…
Thank for this comment; it’s gold.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#94It’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
Same. I once had a professor who heard that and said “of course, you treat books like they’re sacred objects.”
I do keep a notebook where I write about random stuff and a lot of thinking about what I’m reading goes in there.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#95I 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 cool. I imagine instructors creating instances for their classes so the whole class can engage with each other's notes.
I wonder if one could couple it with OCR so that you could point a phone at a page and drop into an emdash experience on the text that you've got a physical copy of. Or, you know, point it at your kindle so that your notes aren't locked into their ecosystem.
I'm building a backend that would support that kind of thing in a peer to peer kind of way (indexes content by piecewise hash so that you can recognize content you or your peers have annotations for and reattach those annotations despite differences in pagination, etc). If I ever get it into a demo-worthy state, I may reach out to see if we can make them work together.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#96Indeed! Learning is the three R's: Reading, wRiting, and Rumination.
This piece on completing the learning loop through summaries resonates with me so strongly, I just hit print.
Sadly, I didn't read Pirsig until a close friend recommended it to me. It's taken me years to grok. I find this summary to be among the best summaries ever written:
http://www.butler-bowdon.com/robert-m-pirsig---zen-and-the-a...
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#97Writing small summaries weekly (or daily) about what’s on your mind or what you’ve learnt is the simplest and most powerful way of self development I know of.
Do you review what you've written at a later date or is the value gained just in the initial writing?
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#98For what?
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you had a different purpose for reading the book, presumably you'd summarize it with that purpose in mind, depth where you need it, omission where you don't.
If you don't care to write that summary down... well that's kind of a separate thing.
Re: Writing summaries is more important than reading more books
#100It’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 "…
>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.
I'm on board. I have a great deal of fun hunting books and sitting down with the good ones I find. I don't care how many I go through or how many pages. Reading good stuff is a matter of quality of life for me. "A life without books is unlivable" Erasmus