Main thing about summaries of books

[StarStruck]

This thread is about reading summaries versus reading the actual book.

After 2 years of a lot of reading I discovered this: a lot of self-help is redundancy, a good summary is better than reading a whole ass self help book, especially after you read the topic for a while and you know the basics. A lot of self help is just redundancy.

There are definitely a lot of books that just should be read but a lot of books are just rehashes of some topics with a special sauce by the author.

The thing with summaries though. A good summary is very difficult to find. And you can't really tell that a summary is a good summary unless you read the book and read the summary afterwards! There is really no way to tell a summary is a good summary unless you trust the writer of the summary.