What is To Summarise?
To Summarise is a blog with a lot of summaries. Mostly book summaries, but sometimes I find other things worth summarising. Occasionally I post blog posts about the books I’ve read.
How To Summarise began
A couple of years ago, I started summarising books that I’d read. I found I often forgot most of what I’d read within weeks or months, even which felt like such a waste. So I started taking notes.
Initially I just took brief notes of interesting titbits. A quote here, an idea scribbled down there. I soon found the process of taking notes helped me to learn and retain ideas.
Over time, my notes got more detailed and evolved into summaries. This is slow going, but it gives me time to think critically about a book’s ideas and makes me more picky about what I read. Writing summaries also forces me to think through how an author’s ideas best fit together (the best order for a summary is rarely the order presented in the original book).
A few years ago, I started sharing my summaries online. This has been great, and I love hearing from readers who appreciate my summaries and thoughts.
Who are you?
I started my career as a lawyer and later moved into policy. This site isn’t about policy per se, but my passion for policy has a big influence on what I end up reading and summarising.
I feel a strong need to understand how the world works and how we might make it better—but I’m also very conscious that well-intentioned policies can backfire. The world is really complex, making it’s hard to form good opinions about how things work and what actions we should take.
But I feel like we must try, because what’s the alternative? We can’t just leave it to all the overconfident people.