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?
If 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.
The 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.
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.
It'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.
I'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?
Facts I find interesting and relevant at the time I was reading them. As an example, the book "Invisible Women" has a lot of great data in it. I don't wanna know the exact numbers, but concepts like:
- The normal human dummy in crash tests define "normal" to be like a man, so women tend to have more injuries in car crashes.
- Women are more at risk for cardiac failure because their heart attacks go undiagnosed. Women experience different symptoms of heart attack than men, and most doctors have been trained using research done on males. For example, men feel it in their chest and left arm whereas women experience pain in their stomach.
The process of writing it or summarizing helps me remember these things so I don't need to look them up as often. But going through my notes again I saw I forgot some things! I don't know when I'll use them when I'm writing them, but I have referenced them conversations before.
> retaining lots of disconnected facts has never really been something I've needed to solve for.
At in regards to Anki usage, the “disconnected facts” seem to be something that only students (high school/college) or people new to Anki do. These people are very much using Anki for a short term goal like passing a test or class. For that use case, “disconnected facts” works just fine.
The people who use Anki (long term) outside of school and outside of 2nd language learning usually have much more connected webs of cards. While the individual cards are usually atomic, they might have a dozen or more cards all attacking a concept from different angles. Also in this usecase it seems just the act of formulating the questions is the biggest part of the learning. The reviewing part is almost secondary.
If I've looked at a concept enough to write cards attacking it from different angles... why would I need to see those cards again? At that point I know that concept.
That is indeed what advocates of spaced repetition say.
Personally I find that knowledge that’s internalized and used does not decay. And devoting effort to refreshing the DRAM for knowledge I’m not using seems like it fails the YAGNI test. Let my brain’s cache eviction algorithm do its thing. If I learned something once I figure I can probably learn it again.
One of my use cases is to memorize function names that I use about once a month - not often enough to memorize them from usage only, but frequently enough that the gains from not having to Google their name every time are worth it.
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.
An 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.
"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.":
