Decide Who It’s For

For fiction books, group them by where they fall into the story structure:

• Beginning (Intro to characters, setting, problem) 
• Rising Action (Tension around problem builds) 
• Climax (Highest point in tension) 
• Falling Action (Resolving loose ends ...

You might feel like it slows you down, but it’ll save you heaps of time in the long run.

• Highlight the book and take notes in the margins 
• Use stickies to mark pages and take notes 
• Take notes in a separate notebook

Just take some minutes at the end of each chapter and use your highlights to fill out these form.

• Chapter number:  
• Chapter title:  
• “Big ideas”:  
• Arguments supporting big ideas:  
• Interesting facts, stats, or analogies:  
• Resonating quotes:  

A book summary is not a book review.

A book review is a description of the book including your opinions, interpretations, ideas, and critiques.

A book summary, sometimes called a synopsis, it recaps all the main ideas and does not inc...

Scan through each summary and pick out the most important ideas & plot points. Jot these down in bullet list form on a separate sheet of paper.  

When deciding which fictional plot points to include, ask yourself, “Is this information vital for understanding the ‘big picture’ of the story?”...

Your mindset is important here. Don’t just blaze through pages as fast as you can. Instead, read each page as if you had to teach the material to someone afterward.

All you have to do is convert your bullet list to paragraph form. The key here is to avoid rambling. Remember, this is a summary. You’re not re-writing the entire book.

If you have a specific page restriction, here’s another tip to stay under the limit:

Page Limit ÷ Number of ...

• It helps solidify what you’ve learned. Summarizing a book in your own words makes you reflect on the information that just entered your brain. 
• It helps you quickly review ideas in the future. Why spend hours reading a book (especially non-fiction) i...

Just take some minutes at the end of each chapter and use your highlights to fill out these form.

• Chapter number:  
• Chapter title:  
• Setting:  
• Characters in chapter:  
• New insights about characters:  
• Main events:  
• Problems & Resolution...