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Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged wi
by jameshart 3y ago
Well it really depends what your goals are, right? What kind of books are you reading, to what end? I personally struggle to think of any book I have engaged with which I got value out of, that could be meaningfully summarized in a couple of hours. The author was an expert on the subject and they only managed to summarize it down to a few hundred pages - if there was only a couple of pages worth of ideas in there presumably they would have just written a blogpost.
- ghostpepper 3y agoI feel like this works a lot better with a typical nonfiction novel, and not eg. a reference textbook.
- jameshart 3y agoWhat's a nonfiction novel?
- jonsen 3y agoCould be an autobiography.
- jameshart 3y agoAn autobiography is not a novel, because it lacks the fundamental aspect of being fictional. There is such a thing as an autobiographical novel, but that is not nonfiction. Because novels are, by definition, works of fiction. The closest thing to a ‘nonfiction novel’ is probably the historical novel, which is a fictionalized historical account… but I’m not sure why such a thing would particularly be suited to this summarization methodology.
- jonsen 3y ago"Fictional narrative: Fictionality is most commonly cited as distinguishing novels from historiography. However this can be a problematic criterion. ... Several novels, for example Ông cố vấn written by Hữu Mai, were designed to be and defined as a "non-fiction" novel which purposefully recorded historical facts in the form of a novel.": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel#Defining_the_genre https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novel#Defining_the_genre
- blangk 3y agoNot sure about this one but something like Atlas Shrugged seems to half fit. Its a novel but it more or less describes a philosophy.
- JenrHywy 3y agoAtlas Shrugged is most definitely fiction. Just because it was written in service of communicating a philosophy/ideology doesn't change that. Same with Camus' The Stranger, or Sartre's Nausea.
- quest88 3y agoIt's up to you. For me, I may write the parts I presently find most useful in detail. And some high-level summaries for reference. Then I can search my notes to know what book I need.
- jameshart 3y agoI'm still not sure why someone would need to do this? What kind of information are you obtaining from books that you later find yourself wanting to search for? These kind of productivity tips always confuse me when they lack context of what the person writing is trying to do. Like: Anki flashcards and spaced repetition. I see a lot of people advocating for them. I have never understood why because, in my personal experience, retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for. I do sort of see how it could work for rapid language learning (though I still think immersion, reading and writing are better than randomized vocabulary memorization, if you can take the time to do it that way), and I think I understand it in the context of fields like medicine where there's just a lot of facts you need to acquire, but people will advocate it for everything, and I just don't get it. When I read a book, the process of reading it adds to the sum of my knowledge; I absorb the ideas, combine them with my own, and come to a new understanding of a topic. At that point, the book has accomplished its goal, for me. But I acknowledge that's just how I read. I'm not an academic who might be later on finding myself needing to recall where I read something so I can cite it (although I find in general I can remember where I read certain things)... is that the use case here? What's the goal with building up an externalized knowledgeable?
- CuriousSkeptic 3y agoIf your genuinely curious there is an attempt at an answer in this book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-smart-notes https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34507927-how-to-take-sma... Gist of it being, like you say, to not only summarise but to process into ones own knowledge base. And yes, this book is targeted at academics with the purpose of setting them up for producing papers, books, or other artefacts from that knowledge base.
- MichaelNolan 3y ago
- pessimizer 3y agoI find that most of the things I read can be pretty effectively summarized in a single thesis sentence and a few additional sentences to generally describe how that thesis was supported. If you're only reading things that can't even be summarized in an abstract, you must be reading a lot of unopinionated biographies?
- jameshart 3y agoIf after reading an entire book you haven’t already internalized its main thesis, it’s probably not a very valuable thesis. But reducing a book down to a single thesis minimizes the takeaway value of the book, surely? Take a book like Gödel Escher Bach. Sure, that book has a thesis. But the value of having read that book is not captured in ‘strange loops are all it takes to create beauty, complexity and consciousness’ - all the different ideas that underpin that thesis are what makes it valuable. That book lives as a set of new connections and pathways between ideas in my brain. And I read it over 20 years ago.
- tsimionescu 3y agoThe vast majority of literature has much of its value in the way it is told, not just in the story it is telling. You can summarize Hamlet in a sentence or two, but that's not the reason it is still being read and performed 400+ years later.
- taeric 3y agoSummarizing is not the same as condensing. Just jotting down your view helps you. Such that you don't even have to worry about making your version for an audience.