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I disagree with this. Reading for the sake of summarizing takes the joy away from reading itself. I don't know anybody that'll read just because they want to read more books.

If I wanted to read summaries I would just read from Coles notes or Sparknotes, but both are essentially me just skimming headlines, and not getting to the juicy bits of the materials.

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I don't think that this author's point is that we read for the sake of summarizing, per se, but rather that the act of summarizing forces us to engage more thoughtfully with what we've just read. It's that engagement itself that enriches our understanding of the book. By all means enjoy what you're reading while you're reading it!

That's the problem here -- for many books you don't need to develop a deep understanding of the book. Even for books in programming language, I may pick up a book because I am interested in the design of the language or a certain pattern of writing code, not because I want to use the language in the production or master the language, in which case understanding and thinking about pieces is good enough.

If you had a different purpose for reading the book, presumably you'd summarize it with that purpose in mind, depth where you need it, omission where you don't.

If you don't care to write that summary down... well that's kind of a separate thing.

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