On the Digestion of Great Books

Books are like food. If “we are what we eat”, then so must we be what we read.

Some books are rotten meat. They should be avoided completely.

Some books are break-up ice-cream. They should only be indulged in, if at all, when we are desperate for a fleeting taste of comfort.

Some books are medicine. They should be cautiously ingested at certain times to treat specific conditions.

Yet, there are a handful of books, far and few between, that are Michelin-star meals. They deserve to be greeted with a tailed-tux and clean palette, chewed with the utmost mindfulness, spat out onto the table to rest for five minutes, licked off the table to savor the flavor of oxidization, digested over a four-hand stomach massage to increase circulation, vomited out Roman-style, spread over the genitalia so that the most sensitive part of the body can gain a tactile appreciation, ingested for a second and penultimate time, passed out quickly with laxatives to preserve the fibrous quality, and cooked in a slow-roast paste to capstone the feast.

This essay shares a method for fully digesting these great books, developed throughout my philosophy degree at Columbia. Only a handful of books deserve this treatment, the ones that are an unending wellspring of insight: The Republic, The Critique of Pure Reason, Things Hidden, The Analects, The Heart Sutra, ...

I will show you not just how to understand these books – a daunting challenge in its own right – but how to uncover hidden insights and bring their ideas into lived reality. So often, we read and forget. But we should not even be content to merely remember and parrot the insights from these great books – this is a guide for how to integrate them into our character and imbed them into our world view.

Also included in this guide are detailed case studies of how I produced my two most popular summaries: Things Hidden and Democracy in America. I will share, step-by-step, everything I did from picking up these books to publishing the final summaries.  

But, I must warn the reader: the method I will share is not for the faint of heart. It takes an ungodly amount of time to fully digest just one text. Girard’s 500-page Things Hidden, for example, took me 300 hours – at a speed of less than 2 pages per hour. Furthermore, this method makes reading a very intensive, draining, and laborious activity. For better and for worse, reading will cease to be passive and leisurely. Instead, you will feel as if you are wrestling the author into the mud on every sentence and word.

The Progressive-Summary Method

The method I am going to share builds upon an already popular method of understanding books: progressive-summarization. When creating a progressive-summary, you mark down important passages while reading, gather your highlights together at the end, and write a first-pass summary of the book. Then, you keep writing summaries of your summary until you’ve distilled the essence of the book down to a manageable chunk.

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