Writing my First Book Summary

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To be honest, I always knew that including writing in my everyday life is going to add a lot of value and meaning and so I wanted to write. But when it came to taking actionable steps, I was directionless. I did not know what to write about, where to publish it or who my audience would be. I also wondered if aiming to build an audience is in conflict with my very personal need to write.

The first time the idea of writing book summaries hit my head was while I was watching the video How I Remember Everything I Read by Ali Abdaal. I started writing a summary of the book called “Goodbye, things”. It is a book on minimalism by Fumio Sasaki. I picked up the book merely because a friend had put up a link to the audio book that was freely available on YouTube. I listened to it while commuting. I decided to write book summaries also because I had realized that I forget the bulk of the kind of books that come with a lot of actionable points. At times, it happened because I got overwhelmed by the suggestions of the author.

Before I got into writing book summaries, I had been reading the passive way. I did not care to actively engage with the material or make notes on what points would be actually useful to be applied in real life. As a result of lack of real-time engagement, down the line, I forgot most of the stuff. This meant that even after reading a ton of books, my actual knowledge, in the long term, did not increase.

To tackle this problem, I had started highlighting stuff that particularly resonated with me in the Kindle app that I use for reading. But research shows that highlighting does not increase memory and I realized that something better had to be done about it.

After having convinced myself of the need to write book summaries, I had to find a way that suited me, both in terms of time spent in actually writing it and the ease of revisiting and recalling it.

My initial idea was to take notes while listening to the audio-book and then write the summary with the help of those notes. But soon after, when the audio was suddenly removed from YouTube, I downloaded the book and started reading it. After completing the book, I resumed writing the summary.

Having already read the book, I thought that writing the summary would become monotonous. More specifically, I thought that it wouldn’t be a learning experience. But it wasn’t so. While paraphrasing any section, I had to really understand the gist of what the author had written. This helped me to connect the dots with the previous sections and understand what the author really intended to imply. I realized that I hadn’t been reading really well as I had been reading a lot lately and had actually started skimming through the content. While skimming through the content does allow you to consume large volumes in less time, I think the real challenge is to be able to retain the information when you actually need it. Laying it all down together in a summary and connecting the dots helped me to get an overall idea of the content of the book.

By writing book summaries, I am not just doing a service to people who don’t have the time or maybe haven’t just convinced themselves of the benefits of regularly reading books, I am also saving the thoughts and ideas of the book in a way that can be retained easily when required. A creator who actually went forward and published his book reviews is Derek Sivers.

The template I suggest for writing non-fiction book summaries is to begin with a summary of the book in 3–4 sentences. This really forces you to think very deeply about the things the author has spoken about. After that you can give the reader some info about who you think would benefit from reading the book and your favorite learnings from the book.

For fiction, the sections can be a little more blended. You can start with the description of the protagonist, followed by the plot, followed by the changes in his behavior or life and then the solution or the ending message. You can also mention the major events that happened in the book followed by a satisfying conclusion or ending note.

Another very useful app for readers is called ReadWise. On watching some videos about it, I found out that it has a service in which they send a mail daily with 5 random highlights from your kindle collection. They also have a feature of integrating the highlights into Notion that is very useful for organizing things that you read. So after the integration, one has in a notion page all the highlights from a particular book. This can be done for books that you either do not have time to write a summary for, or for some reason you think that you can extract maximum value from just the text in the highlights.

This makes me conclude that if I write a summary for every book that I read, I will be thousand times wiser than if I just read the books. I hope this inspired you too to begin reading in a manner that will help you retain everything!