The AI Summarized the Book. I Pretended I Read It

The summary was excellent: the thesis, the arguments, the sharp conclusion. I quoted it at dinner and impressed everyone. I have never read a book the same way since, which is to say, I have never read one at all.

The first time was an accident. A friend recommended a long, dense history, and I bought it, and I did not read it, because the summary was right there, and the summary was good. It gave me the arc, the evidence, the counterarguments, the verdict. Everything except the experience.

At dinner I mentioned the book. Someone asked what I thought of the final chapter. I opened my mouth, and the summary came out, smoothly, with the right pauses. The table nodded. Someone said I had really gotten to the heart of it. I had gotten to the heart of it the way a map gets to the heart of a city.

Now I read everything this way. The summaries are excellent, and they are getting better. They compress a thousand pages into the shape of an argument, and the shape is what people mean when they say a book changed them, and I am changed, in a sense, the way a landscape is changed by a photograph.

Here is the part I cannot tell anyone at the dinner table: I know what I am missing. I know that the summary cannot give me the sentence on page 312 that would have rearranged my furniture. I know that reading is a slow, inefficient, irreplaceable encounter between one mind and another, and that I have replaced it with a faster thing that is not the same thing.

I keep buying books. They pile up on the shelf, and the shelf has opinions now, because I have fed them all to the summarizer. Last week I started a book and deliberately did not summarize it. I read sixty pages. It was slow. I found a sentence on page 41 that I will keep, and the summarizer would have cut it, and I have started to think that the sentences the summarizer cuts are the whole point.