@nabeelqu — on tools-for-thought

my take. reading book summaries is consuming food in smoothie form. that line broke my pkm habit in half.

This is a clip-and-annotate of a thread that ran for maybe forty minutes on a slow tuesday in march. The thread itself is short. The reason it's here is that one line in the middle of it reorganised about three years of habit for me, and I want to be able to find it again.

Reading book summaries is consuming food in smoothie form. The important stuff needs slow, original-form digestion. We trick ourselves into thinking the act of capturing a summary is the act of learning.

The metaphor is doing more work than it should be. Smoothies are pre-broken-down food: easier to digest, faster, less effortful — and you can have a lot more of them. The cost is that your body doesn't get the slow signals it gets from chewing, the gut doesn't get the fibre in the form it expects, and you tend to over-consume because there's nothing in the form-factor that tells you to stop.

I deleted the readwise account a week later. Not because reading is bad, but because the act of capturing the summary had become the substitute for thinking about it. I'd highlight a passage, feel intellectually fed, and move on. Six months on i couldn't tell you what the passage said.

Now I do something duller. I read a book, then I close it, and I try to write 200 words about what it changed in my head. If I can't write the 200, I haven't read the book. If I can, the book is metabolised.

This site — the marginalia section specifically — is the public version of that practice. Every clip here is a 200-word attempt.