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 enjoy hearing from readers who appreciate my summaries and thoughts.
Who are you?
I am currently working as a policy analyst. Before my current job, I was a lawyer. I’ve always had to read and write a lot for my work.
Fortunately, I quite enjoy reading and writing. I always wanted to be a writer, so blogging seemed like a natural fit for me. Yet I didn’t want to limit myself to a niche and blogging generally about “my thoughts” seemed too self-indulgent. So I figured I’d just start by summarising what other people have written and see where that takes me.