Summarizing Summaries and Finding Treasure

We forget 90% of what we read within 24 hours. Then over the next week we forget 90% of that 10%. 10 years after reading Moby Dick, we might recall that it's about a one legged nut named Ahab chasing a white whale while in the company of somebody we could call Ishmael and another guy named Starbuck and a tatooed guy with a harpoon.

I remember a little more than that based on the simple fact that I never read Moby Dick. I read the Cliff Notes for Moby Dick. Like almost all English majors, Cliff Notes were a very important part of my arsenal for effective collegiate time management. Nobody could possibly read all the books that were assigned to us. We chose our courses by how many books in the course were available in Cliff Note format. The more books available as Cliff notes, the more time at the bar.

Moby Dick showed up in 2 or 3 of my college classes and I was always happy when it did. 

One of the great and ongoing benefits of Cliff notes is that I became interested in summaries and reviews. Over the last few weeks, I've read hundreds of movie reviews and dozens of novel summaries. I particularly enjoy the movie reviews of Roger Ebert. Lately I've been getting a perverse kick by reading reviews of crappy horror movies written by enthusiastic rather than skillful critics.

Here's the beauty of such reading. If I'm reading a summary of a novel that I actually read (like War and Peace for example), much of what I had forgotten comes back to me as if I've come upon a buried treasure. The treasure was there from the first reading but it had been covered over by so much new information in my working memory that the book was reduced to a story about Russia, Napoleon and a peasant being tied to a bear and both of them thrown into a pool to amuse the rich. 

Not only did the summary take me back to Pierre and Natasha and many others, it also refreshed my memory concerning the joy and challenge of reading the book in the first place. I remember how proud I was while I was making my way through the 1600 pages thinking with every page turn that soon the effort would be too much for me and I would lose track of the characters and give up on the book. When I finished reading the book, I came to the conclusion that I was a pretty good reader.

All of that came back to me as I read a summary of the book that contained about 1600 words....every word was the equivalent of a page. 

Wow.

In terms of pages, the summary was maybe four pages in length. I hesitate to call the 1596 pages of the actual novel filler because that takes away from the joy of reading but inevitable memory loss took care of the 1596 pages which left me surprised and refreshed by the summary.

Same thing with movie reviews. The main difference with movie reviews is that I can remember who I saw the movie with and what was going on in my life when I saw the movie but most of the actual details of any movie that I've seen only once have Gone With The Wind. A good review takes me back to the movie itself as well as the collaborative efforts that made the movie possible in the first place; an enthusiastic review of an obsure film amuses me. Every so often, an enthusiastic reviewer will stumble upon a movie that I consider an obscure classic (Carnival of Souls). I find those reviews particularly enriching.

I get a double kick out of reading a literary review and summary of a novel that eventually became a movie for example Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I saw the movie first (actually it was the first movie that I ever saw. I didn't know what a movie was and I was afraid of the dark. Jekyll/Hyde was played by John Barrymore. I came home traumatized and my Mom was pissed off at my Dad for taking me to see the thing in the first place. The next movie we saw as a Tom Mix western which ended my fear of the movies. We saw both of those films at the Dryden theater at the home of George Eastman the guy who started Kodak and made photography accessible to the common man. In his theater which was free to the public, old time silent movies became a staple of Sunday afternoons for our family)

The first time that i read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I read it strictly as a horror story. I was 11 years old.

The second time I read it, I was amazed at what the book said about addiction and the ongoing battle between good and evil that rages within all of us. The book had great dimension.

I included the book in my curriculum when I started teaching at the high school. We went deep in our analysis of the novel which provided fodder for great dimensional and demential discussion.

I came across a summary of the novel yesterday which stimulated me to write this whole essay on summarys while it simultaneously led me to the buried treasures of past memory and experience. I'm going to re-read the book this week.

Fun recovered fact (maybe not so fun). In the book Hyde finally overtakes Jekyll and when his dead body is discovered it has not transformed back into Jekyll as it tends to do in the movies.

Furthermore, the summary led me to remember Treasure Island also written by Babaloo Stevenson which is very much about hidden treasure. Remembering Babaloo brought memorys of a card game we used to play when we were children called Authors. One of the kids that I played Authors with was a guy named Norge. Now I'm psyched to write a story about Babaloo, Treasure Island , Norge and dyslexia which I'm gonna start later this week. I hope you'll feel inspired to read it. Right now, it's just a shimmer

So in summary, if you want to skip all that I've just written which of course you can't do now that you're here with me and have read the proceeding unless you skipped all of i the above to get to tthe finish so that you could do something else:

IT'S All ABOUT READING SUMMARIES AND HOW THEY CAN LEAD TO BURIED TREASURE.