I have this nagging feeling (maybe you do too?) that it’s cheating and I’m not really learning if it’s so easy. The same voice makes me feel guilty when using coding agents to code or ChatGPT in meetings.
I’m telling that voice to relax.
I upload books to Claude and ask it to “Comprehensively and engagingly summarize and fact-check, writing in Malcolm Gladwell’s style, the book …”. I can read it in an hour instead of twelve. Four bullet points instead of forty. With (this surprised me) roughly the same number of insights I actually do something with.
I read books for pleasure, learning, and implementing.
That last bit is key, but the bottleneck isn’t the book. It’s me: how much I can absorb, retain, and act on. From what I can tell, between reading 300 pages vs 10, there’s not much difference.
The pleasure is intact
I worried I’d lose the emotional jolt – those mind-blown moments that make reading feel worth it. For science and self-help books, I haven’t.
For example, take this summary excerpt of How Minds Change
The irony is almost too perfect. To change someone’s mind, you have to stop trying to change their mind. You have to start by trying to understand it.
And when you do that—really do that—something unexpected happens. Sometimes their mind changes. And sometimes, if you’re honest with yourself, yours does too.
That blew my mind for a good 10 minutes.
Or, from Ants:
Think of a leafcutter ant colony as a high-tech Fungus Farm. There are four main players in this system: two are partners, one is a bodyguard, and one is a villain.
I loved the villain part!
There’s a learning bonus: fact-checking
When I ask Claude to fact-check the book while summarizing, I learn beyond the book. For example, I learnt that, among these longevity books:
- Lifespan is largely rubbish.
- The Telomere Effect has a decent core but builds fancy castles on shaky foundations.
- Outlive is more careful with its claims, though less ambitious.
I learned this during the reading, not months later when some podcast corrected me.
You can also just… ask questions.
- While reading Ants, “OK, aren’t most species superorganisms then? If yes, what’s the big deal?”
- While reading The Cancer Code, “Why are free radicals produced? Give me examples. Are they always oxygen molecules that lack electrons? ELI15.”
The book doesn’t do that. The summary can. (I’m loving the ELI15 responses, BTW.)
I can read inaccessible books
I can now read Kamba Ramayanam in Tamil (a script I read quite slowly). Or Gitanjali, The Iliad, Dream of the Red Chamber, or more.
It’s not just language. I can read boring or intimidating books. On Growth and Form. The Road to Reality. The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Brilliant but unapproachable.
Heck, I managed to read Ants after 30 years!
Sometimes the very first line of a summary hooks me so hard I can’t stop reading. That’s a strange thing to admit about a summary. But there it is.
I haven’t figured it out fully
I would read Brandon Sanderson or Jeffrey Archer this way yet. The point is the experience itself: the slow unfolding, the surprise, the voice in your ear. They write in a style I like. Why summarize that?
Biographies are trickier. The Choice’s summary made me cry. So, I do want to read The Choice in original - and the summary helped me prioritize it.
Histories? I’m not sure. Manga? No way.
I’m logging these on Goodreads as “read”. I don’t know if that’s kosher. The voice in my head has opinions. But I’m learning things I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, from books I wouldn’t have finished or started, with the same pleasure and actionability.
Maybe that’s cheating. But maybe the rules of our game have changed, and I haven’t learned them yet.
Update: 31 Dec 2025. Here are the books I read this year via AI summaries, along with links to the Claude summaries.
- Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá Claude
- The Molecule of More by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke Claude
- Noise by Daniel Kahnemann Claude
- How to Change by Katy Milkman Claude
- Lifespan by David Sinclair and The Telomere EFfect by Elizabeth Blackburn and Outlive by Peter Attia. Claude
- How Minds Change by David McRaney Claude
- The Obesity Code by Jason Fung Claude
- The Diabetes Code by Jason Fung Claude
- The Cancer Code by Jason Fung Claude
- The Ants by Bert Hölldobler, Edward O. Wilson Claude
- Price of the Modi Years by Aakar Patel Claude
- Behave by Robert Sapolsky Claude
- The Choice by Edith Eva Eger Claude
- How Not To Die by Michael Greger Claude
- Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker Claude
- The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson Claude
- The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes Claude
- Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer Claude Gemini
- The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
- The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould Claude
- The Extended Phenotype by Richard Dawkins Claude
- The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk Claude
- The Culture Map by Erin Meyer Claude
- Outcomes over Output by Josh Seiden Claude
- The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
- The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee Claude
- Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli Claude
- The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt Claude
- Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan Claude
- Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel Claude
- Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell Claude
- Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine by Robert H. Lustig Claude
- The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Claude
- How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker Claude
- The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
- The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker Claude
- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan Claude
- Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures Claude
- Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran Claude
- Small Wins Every Day: 100 Powerful Ways to Transform Your Life and Health by Luke Coutinho Claude
- The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran Claude