I can't speak for others, but for me this headline and idea is exactly and perfectly wrong, so I suppose I just want to reach those for whom this generates unnecessary "guilt" or something like that.
As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore.
I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "survival of the fittest ideas" in my head, often subconsciously. Once I relaxed and decided, "If the stuff in this book is good enough, my brain will keep it FOR me" both my satisfaction AND utility of books increased dramatically.
(which is to say, it's not that I never write anything down. It's that if I do, it's not tied to the book, but to the "thing" or "topic" that I'm interested in, with a reference TO the book)
> I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight.
The good thing is that it’s not an either/or proposition. I often read a book straight-through then decide it will be useful enough to me in the future that there are elements I want to retain, in which case I’ll engage in a second cursory extraction process. Often I just don’t know in advance whether I will feel that way at the outset.
I generally disagree with any assertion on what’s more important on such a wide array of variation, for who and when. Sure, it could be important for some things and irrelevant for others things at the same time.
Update: yes, it is not just a matter of texts. The annoying snipers that infest these boards should summarize as a general practice: this will help them with an exercise in thinking, expression, so that maybe one day they will also be able to formulate and present an argument. And stop abusing the freedom they should not be granted.
In my opinion it's just another symptom of the trend in tech circles for ever-increasing self-documentation. Thing is, it doesn't matter how hard you try to shove your life up its own ass, you're going to be just as dead as me at the end of it. And I'll have read more cool stuff.
It's a classic begging the question fallacy. Summary is absolutely a way to maximize certain outcomes of reading, but not all outcomes! Which outcomes to value is a question we can all reflect on.
Another way of thinking of it is that you are indexing. Perhaps you will come across something in the future which makes you recall that thing you read. This might give new significance to what you read and gives you a reference you can fall back on as needed.
For me this happened with distributed transactions and sagas in Building Microservices by Sam Newman. He went into detail on these techniques and pretty much the only thing I retained was that they existed and what problem they solved. I didn’t remembered the other 95%. But I ran into a need for them and instead of having no idea what to do I thought: “I should learn more about distributed transactions, sagas, or other alternatives.”
It depends on the books I am reading. I get the most out of philosophy and learning books when I actively engage with the text with responses in kind. But when I am reading mind candy? No, I don’t write back.
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 to read other books around the same topic.
One thing that has really helped me is to scribble notes in the margins and to write a précis after every chapter, then a précis on the inside cover of the book to summarize all my chapter précis.
Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading. This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice but the truth is you can’t understand a book deeply on first reading because you don’t have the lay of the land and the benefit of retrospection. A rereading helps you focus on details missed the first time around. To be honest though, very few books meet my bar of my willing to reread them.
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 comprehension.
I'm testing out a summarization/rephrase feature backed by LLMs that you can try in the demo. In HN fashion I'm trying to build this openly and gather feedback to see what works. I'd like to push this further in the active direction the article mentions with something like a Socratic dialogue mode where you're nudged to re-explain and examine ideas.
If anyone uses this thing/has feedback, let me know. Source is available too [2].
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.
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.
I tried 'related' with a couple of passages. For the first passage, the first result was a good semantic match, but the rest were a little too far off. For the second passage, the results were amazing.
Perhaps for the first you just didn't have any more snippets that were closer?
Are the related snippets taken from a selection of snippets you created, or from the full text of other books?
A nice workflow might be to select a passage I'm reading in a book, and then see related passages from other books. But that requires I have DRM-free ebooks, and that these have already been chunked and indexed.
I've been looking for something like this to review books. Two suggestions: 1. allow to load a book from a url, so notes could be added to arbitrary books; 2. allow to select text and add notes to that selection.
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.
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.
This nuance gets missed in most conversations about reading. I see there are motivations to read a book:
1. For fun
2. For information
3. For understanding
If reading for fun, do what suits you… there’s really no wrong way. Like food, whatever suits your tastes is best.
If reading for information (eg on tactics in some battle or HR practices in some form when you are already broadly acquainted with tactics and HR) then there are tips for extracting essential points that apply to most everyone.
Likewise when reading for understanding (eg having no conception about how war works and trying to grok it).
Some books can be read in each way, other books only in one or two. In any case, making broad claims about “how to read better” without appealing to one of these modes usually sparks disagreement.
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!
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that
all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but
James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive
women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took
thousands of words to say it.
Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a
major world power.
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise
the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right
out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize
nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
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.
I 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?
Summarizing 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.
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 summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.
Tiago Forte popularized the idea of "Progressive Summarization", which starts with extensive highlighting, then rounds of progressive refinement, ie bold key phrases and concepts in a given passage, then later review those and summarize in your own words. Strong approach for retention and comprehension...
Strong agree from me, though what I do is less involved than the article. I normally just take a few per-chapter summary notes in an org-mode outline, in a filename that starts with the year I read the book.
Recently I started creating my own topic index with pointers to which books I found certain insights in. I know I could generate such a thing automatically with tagging, but I enjoy manually curating my index.
Here’s a really good trick: Read a book then find the nearest victim to excitedly tell all about what you’ve learned. The back and forth conversation is even better than writing it down.
If you really found the book useful, go write a summary after that conversation. It will be a much stronger summary and also way easier to write.
I've been using Obsidian recently and I can say it's had a big impact on my life. When I was younger I used to read a lot, but i hardly remember anything. Now, when I read something important, I'm sure to summarize it in Obsidian. I can remember it easier and even if I can't, I know where to go to find that information.
You can use llamaindex to load your vault and parse it to a local LLM (you can use openai if you’re comfortable with it). You end up getting your own personal search engine and it’s amazing. I really should finish my write up about it (also written in Obsidian)
Inspectional reading is one of the key limitations for me when reading books on the Kindle. I need to be able to quickly flip around from toc to glossary and between chapters. There’s still too much friction for that with the ebook format.
Writing 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.
I totally agree, and surprised it's a bit controversial here. I understand that reading for pleasure can be different than reading for comprehension
But I lean towards reading for comprehension. I have a wiki which includes all the books I've read. The good ones get their own wiki pages with the main things I learned, and other notes.
A key point is that I don't take notes while I read. I only do it LATER -- because if you can't remember what to write down for a few days, then you probably won't retain it, and it may not be worth retaining.
----
As a specific example, when thinking about this -- I wonder if anybody has read "The Signal vs. The Noise" by Nate Silver? I remember reading it because a friend had a copy.
Many years later, off the top of my head, I can't remember a single thing in that book. Question for other readers: can you remember a single thing from it?
I think maybe it's because I kinda knew most of the stuff in that book? I will refer to my notes.
On the other hand, I've been re-reading Antifragile by Taleb, which I first read in 2012 I believe, and it struck me how many things I absorbed unconsciously from that book, which I didn't ascribe to it.
For example I remember talking about "hormesis" during COVID, i.e. small errors and stress. And also I took up some light weightlifting because I thought it was a good complement to bike riding. i.e. having 2 different kinds of exercise
---
edit: Just went to back to my notes on Silver's book (finished January 2014). Surprisingly I was extremely positive on the book -- I said the writing was engaging, it's well-sourced, very good set of topics (weather prediction, earthquakes, terrorists, poker, basketball, financial markets), and novel insights
Though the funny thing is that I didn't say what the actual insights were. The only one was the importance of knowing when you don't know, which I also got from Taleb
So maybe I should go back to that book and see if I still think it's good, and if there were insights I didn't get elsewhere
It's funny perhaps that my perception of the book has been clouded by Silver's reputation. I think he has been criticized for "predicting the present" and of "horse race coverage", and I think that's true now. But back when I read the book, I probably had a much more positive impression of him!! Very interesting
To each their own, I love summarizing books. I have a template in Day One to do a personal "book review" for each book I finish (yes, High School me is gagging at this thought).
I’m at 47 books read this year so far and mostly disagree with the author of the article. When you find a book that’s worth summarizing, do it. But I get exposed to many more ideas (and find the ones worth thinking about more) simply by reading more.
Also, I just like reading. My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.
> My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.
The reason many people accumulate wealth is to spend it, not to stare at it insecurely. It goes without saying that knowing more things expands the number of things you can do.
I also do about 50/year. It's entirely for recreation. A lot of the books are non-fiction and educational but I'm not doing work. I'm enjoying myself and there's no outcome I'm hoping for besides that enjoyment in the moment.
[+] [-] jrm4|2 years ago|reply
As a voracious reader, I've personally found that I got the most out of books when I stopped trying to summarize and highlight. I very rarely do either anymore.
I realize that what happens is sort of a Darwinian "survival of the fittest ideas" in my head, often subconsciously. Once I relaxed and decided, "If the stuff in this book is good enough, my brain will keep it FOR me" both my satisfaction AND utility of books increased dramatically.
(which is to say, it's not that I never write anything down. It's that if I do, it's not tied to the book, but to the "thing" or "topic" that I'm interested in, with a reference TO the book)
[+] [-] kashunstva|2 years ago|reply
The good thing is that it’s not an either/or proposition. I often read a book straight-through then decide it will be useful enough to me in the future that there are elements I want to retain, in which case I’ll engage in a second cursory extraction process. Often I just don’t know in advance whether I will feel that way at the outset.
[+] [-] grugagag|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdp2021|2 years ago|reply
Insightful → process subconsciously;
Informative → summarize.
--
Update: yes, it is not just a matter of texts. The annoying snipers that infest these boards should summarize as a general practice: this will help them with an exercise in thinking, expression, so that maybe one day they will also be able to formulate and present an argument. And stop abusing the freedom they should not be granted.
[+] [-] causality0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aeturnum|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonethewiser|2 years ago|reply
For me this happened with distributed transactions and sagas in Building Microservices by Sam Newman. He went into detail on these techniques and pretty much the only thing I retained was that they existed and what problem they solved. I didn’t remembered the other 95%. But I ran into a need for them and instead of having no idea what to do I thought: “I should learn more about distributed transactions, sagas, or other alternatives.”
[+] [-] kirso|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leroy-is-here|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lupire|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wenc|2 years ago|reply
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 to read other books around the same topic.
One thing that has really helped me is to scribble notes in the margins and to write a précis after every chapter, then a précis on the inside cover of the book to summarize all my chapter précis.
Finally all good books should be read twice or more. Good reading is rereading. This is a hard rule to follow because nobody has time to read the same book twice but the truth is you can’t understand a book deeply on first reading because you don’t have the lay of the land and the benefit of retrospection. A rereading helps you focus on details missed the first time around. To be honest though, very few books meet my bar of my willing to reread them.
[+] [-] dmotz|2 years ago|reply
I'm testing out a summarization/rephrase feature backed by LLMs that you can try in the demo. In HN fashion I'm trying to build this openly and gather feedback to see what works. I'd like to push this further in the active direction the article mentions with something like a Socratic dialogue mode where you're nudged to re-explain and examine ideas.
If anyone uses this thing/has feedback, let me know. Source is available too [2].
[1] https://emdash.ai
[2] https://github.com/dmotz/emdash
[+] [-] __MatrixMan__|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] callistus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pkukkapalli|2 years ago|reply
[1]: https://ishmael.app
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|2 years ago|reply
Perhaps for the first you just didn't have any more snippets that were closer?
Are the related snippets taken from a selection of snippets you created, or from the full text of other books?
A nice workflow might be to select a passage I'm reading in a book, and then see related passages from other books. But that requires I have DRM-free ebooks, and that these have already been chunked and indexed.
[+] [-] summarity|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tester457|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ssgh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] packetlost|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_af|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] OmarShehata|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loughnane|2 years ago|reply
1. For fun 2. For information 3. For understanding
If reading for fun, do what suits you… there’s really no wrong way. Like food, whatever suits your tastes is best.
If reading for information (eg on tactics in some battle or HR practices in some form when you are already broadly acquainted with tactics and HR) then there are tips for extracting essential points that apply to most everyone.
Likewise when reading for understanding (eg having no conception about how war works and trying to grok it).
Some books can be read in each way, other books only in one or two. In any case, making broad claims about “how to read better” without appealing to one of these modes usually sparks disagreement.
[+] [-] cptaj|2 years ago|reply
I recommend getting drinks with friends and telling them all about the interesting stuff you read.
[+] [-] donutshop|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cosou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueBall|2 years ago|reply
Well, anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that's it: 24 words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it.
Or consider "The Brothers Karamazov", by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who kill their father.
Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's impossible to tell because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talk as much as the Karamazovs did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world power.
I'm told that Dostoyevsky wrote "The Brothers Karamazov" to raise the question of whether there is a God. So why didn't he just come right out and say: "Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me."
Other famous works could easily have been summarized in a few words:
* "Moby Dick" -- Don't mess around with large whales because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
* "A Tale of Two Cities" -- French people are crazy.
[+] [-] jameshart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teodorlu|2 years ago|reply
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 summary! Go further. Apply it to your context. Try it, it's fun.
[+] [-] chrisweekly|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasperry|2 years ago|reply
Recently I started creating my own topic index with pointers to which books I found certain insights in. I know I could generate such a thing automatically with tagging, but I enjoy manually curating my index.
[+] [-] Swizec|2 years ago|reply
If you really found the book useful, go write a summary after that conversation. It will be a much stronger summary and also way easier to write.
[+] [-] charlie0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntaxing|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cout|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] counternotions|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molly0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rufbdbskrufb473|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chubot|2 years ago|reply
But I lean towards reading for comprehension. I have a wiki which includes all the books I've read. The good ones get their own wiki pages with the main things I learned, and other notes.
A key point is that I don't take notes while I read. I only do it LATER -- because if you can't remember what to write down for a few days, then you probably won't retain it, and it may not be worth retaining.
----
As a specific example, when thinking about this -- I wonder if anybody has read "The Signal vs. The Noise" by Nate Silver? I remember reading it because a friend had a copy.
Many years later, off the top of my head, I can't remember a single thing in that book. Question for other readers: can you remember a single thing from it?
I think maybe it's because I kinda knew most of the stuff in that book? I will refer to my notes.
On the other hand, I've been re-reading Antifragile by Taleb, which I first read in 2012 I believe, and it struck me how many things I absorbed unconsciously from that book, which I didn't ascribe to it.
For example I remember talking about "hormesis" during COVID, i.e. small errors and stress. And also I took up some light weightlifting because I thought it was a good complement to bike riding. i.e. having 2 different kinds of exercise
---
edit: Just went to back to my notes on Silver's book (finished January 2014). Surprisingly I was extremely positive on the book -- I said the writing was engaging, it's well-sourced, very good set of topics (weather prediction, earthquakes, terrorists, poker, basketball, financial markets), and novel insights
Though the funny thing is that I didn't say what the actual insights were. The only one was the importance of knowing when you don't know, which I also got from Taleb
So maybe I should go back to that book and see if I still think it's good, and if there were insights I didn't get elsewhere
It's funny perhaps that my perception of the book has been clouded by Silver's reputation. I think he has been criticized for "predicting the present" and of "horse race coverage", and I think that's true now. But back when I read the book, I probably had a much more positive impression of him!! Very interesting
[+] [-] jordanmorgan10|2 years ago|reply
I even setup a Siri Shortcut to pull out all of my Kindle highlights to stick in there: https://twitter.com/JordanMorgan10/status/130370253693587046...
[+] [-] mathgeek|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] paulcole|2 years ago|reply
Also, I just like reading. My goal isn’t to have some kind of personal knowledge base to prove how much I’ve comprehended to myself.
[+] [-] pessimizer|2 years ago|reply
The reason many people accumulate wealth is to spend it, not to stare at it insecurely. It goes without saying that knowing more things expands the number of things you can do.
[+] [-] superkuh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrits|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dahves|2 years ago|reply