Update (as at Sep 2024): While this post still reflects why I started this site, my reasons for continuing it have changed. Since writing this post, I’ve gained subscribers so the “hypothetical readers” I describe below are now real people. I no longer write my summaries primarily for myself—now I strive to fairly and accurately represent a book and clearly separate out my viewpoints from the author’s.
My recent book summary, Bullshit Jobs, took a lot more time than I would have liked. So I am writing this short post to remind myself why I started writing summaries to begin with.
Why I write summaries
You see, my summaries are mainly meant to be for me. The reason I read, particularly non-fiction, is to learn new things. But reading is not, in itself, a great way to learn. When you’re just taking information in passively, it doesn’t stick. (I learned that from the excellent MOOC, Learning How to Learn.) Learning is much more effective if you actively engage with the information. So writing a summary helps me learn in several ways:
- Writing a summary from memory makes me practise active recall. I have to try to bring to mind what I have recently read. (You can probably guess from the detail in some of my summaries that I am not writing them purely from memory. That said, I usually do start the “Key Takeaways” section from scratch and refer to notes only when tidying it up.)
- Paraphrasing what the author says forces me to truly understand their arguments.
- Going over my notes shortly after reading is a form of spaced repetition.
- Summarising an entire book into the equivalent of one or two pages requires a lot of engagement. I have to think about what things are really important, and how things link together in the most logical way. (The most logical for me, anyway. My summaries will often differ from the way an author has ordered their chapters.)
- Writing summaries would also help me practise my writing skills.
My summaries were not intended to be a substitute for reading the actual book. Some of my early summaries were very brief. I felt quite comfortable leaving out large parts of the book if I did not think those parts were useful or interesting, or if they covered things I already knew well.
Publishing my summaries
I started publishing my summaries on the off-chance that they might be useful to other people. Although I’d be delighted if this site took off, I see it more as a hobby than a business. It would be more than enough for me if this site helped me find some like-minded people to discuss books with and exchange ideas.
But when I started publishing my summaries on this site, things changed. My summaries were now “public”. Even if no one reads my summaries, anyone could. I started to feel the need to make my summaries thorough. I didn’t want to misrepresent what the author was saying, so I started using their words instead of paraphrasing.
I started writing summaries for someone else. A hypothetical person who hasn’t read the book yet, who is using my summary to get the key ideas from the book or to decide whether or not to read it.
I need to stop writing summaries for hypothetical people and go back to writing them for myself.