Over at Books, Bikes, & Boomsticks Tam writes on the problems associated with reading a summary. Here, it's short, go read the whole thing: Soulless Drones
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OK, we're all back. For great art, sure, I'll agree that one has to read / listen / watch the entire piece as presented. However, if you just want to get caught up on the n movies you missed in the Avengers movie series over the past m summers so that you can go to an afternoon matinee and enjoy it with friends – without having to spend a week of catch-up in front of the tube – nah, go ahead and skip to the Wikipedia plot summaries. You won't have missed much anyway. Long-series TV shows that start off promising but take a dip in the second year? Sure, skip ahead with the summaries and see if the third year picks up to determine if it's worth your time to work through the series. That politics-tainted speculative fiction (i.e., really bad near-future sci-fi) potboiler that everyone's talking about? Definitely. You'll want to know a little about what Cousin Hal or Aunt Margaret are going on about at the next family gathering, but you probably don't want to take that 500 page slog. Again, when it comes to real art don't take any shortcuts, but when it comes to lesser works, go for the bottom line and get on with life.
Taking this a step further, who doesn't cull through the titles, then skim through the half-dozen abstracts, then really read only one or two papers each month in their favorite journals? There just isn't time enough to keep up in a field any other way.
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