Down with Executive Summaries

Just read it.

I listen to podcasts about productivity. My favourite is probably Deep Work with Cal Newport. But once you’re in that world, you will hear adverts for book summary services like Blinkist and Headway – and somehow they will appear in your Instagram feed. The last time this happened, I had rather a visceral reaction.

I’ve written a bit about this before. Last year, in explaining why I wrote The God Particle, I railed against the “YorkNotesification of Stories” in which I made the point that fiction does things and says things that non-fiction cannot. But here, I’d like to make the point that non-fiction is an art which does not benefit from intense distillation.

And that espresso-like condensation of information is the promise of the likes of Blinklist and Headway. The latter, for example, offers summaries of popular non-fiction books that will help you “grasp the book’s key ideas in less than 15 minutes”. This rather implies that the author has taken too long to make the point and that most of the book is ‘filler’, added to justify the cover price.

If I’m honest, I’ve found most non-fiction books I’ve read in the last ten years to be slightly too long. Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is brilliant, with astonishing explanatory power and is, if I’m honest, at least eighty pages too long. But David Goodhart’s Road to Somewhere felt about right at 304 pages. I was sad some years ago when I finished reading Simon Singh’s truly brilliant Fermat’s Last Theorem.

Would I have benefited from the 15-minute version of any of these books? I can categorically say, ‘no’. Getting the main point of Haidt’s Righteous Mind in 15 minutes, is like saying I’ve effectively been to Hawaii through looking at photos and learning about the imports and exports. It’s just plain silly. So why do it?

Non-fiction does occasionally run long, but you can stop after a hundred and fifty pages if you feel you’ve read enough. But these books are not mostly ‘filler’. They are mostly information, illustration, argumentation and evidence. So, read the book. The author is trying to make the point. She or he is using various techniques to make that point, as well as move and surprise you. Let them do their job.

Too Close to the Bone

Some may be thinking that I protest too much, as the author of three non-fiction books. I’ve written about my last two books, The Sacred Art of Joking and The Gospel According to A Sitcom Writer, a fair amount on this substack.

My third book is actually my first: Death by Civilisation, a collection of articles I’d written for Third Waymagazine. As I picked my favourites, an overall theme emerged from the writing, which I wrote up in the introduction and conclusion.

Here's the summary: I suggested that if we think our problems will be fixed either by the State or the free market, we’re going to be very disappointed. The State has coercive power, but wields it like a blunt instrument. Whilst the magistrate has its place, the state will not and cannot give you the one thing that you need the most: love. (On that, I highly recommend Aaron Renn’s article on how the Democratic Party is the party of Single Women.) Likewise, the invisible hand of the market, as explained by Adam Smith, is a very cold hand. Whilst it tends to reward hard work, it doesn’t care about you one bit.

Some reading this summary might be exploding that I’ve crudely summarised the position of the Left or the Right. Of course I have. It’s a one paragraph summary that requires further discussion and explanation. I’m not sure I do a good job of making my case that in the book, but you could always get it and find out. (I make so little money from actual sales of Death by Civilisation, that I’m not urging you to buy a copy. But it is still available here if you’re curious.)

Samples

Summaries are helpful, then, when they make you want to know more and read the book for yourself. That’s why I download a lot of Kindle samples. It’s a brilliant service that helps me work out if I’d like to spend a small amount of money and a lot of time in that particular book. Even then, I read books and abandon them after a hundred pages if I’m not enjoying them or finding them useful or edifying.

So, getting the fifteen-minute summary of a book and convincing yourself that you’ve basically read the book, is born of an overly-cranked, TED-talking, maximal-productivity mindset that really isn’t healthy.

Worse, this way of thing ends up in the Church, where we want ‘the headlines’ of the Letter to the Hebrews. No. This part of scripture is worthy of study and deep reflection. In fact, as we discover from Lee Gatiss on the Cooper and Cary Have Words podcast, one of England’s greatest theologians, John Owen, wrote two million words in a four-volumed commentary on Hebrews.

But why have the ‘headlines’ of scripture, when you can just read it? I asked for a Reader’s Bible for my last birthday. The verse numbers have been removed, and the chapter numbers are small, so that you can just read the Bible like, you know, a book. We’d think nothing of reading a novel for 45 minutes. Why wouldn’t we do that with scripture? That’s about how long it would take to read the whole of Hebrews. Why not do that?

Headway says that if you go with them and ‘read’ for 15 minutes a day, you’ll be reading 30 books a month. Except you’re not, are you? You’re kidding yourself that you’re well informed, erudite and productive. And, if a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, congratulations, you are very dangerous.