Recently, out of curiosity, I read a sparknotes summary of one of my favourite books of all time: The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I read through it, hoping to rekindle some of the emotions I felt when reading the full book, but found myself disappointed. Although the main takeaways were there – the summary was concise, and there were even details that I hadn’t picked up upon reading myself – there was a certain magic lacking in such a short form abstract of the book. It felt like blending a perfectly good dinner and drinking it as a shake: the ingredients were technically there, and it might be faster to digest, but the flavour was lost.

After reading the synopsis for some time, I felt frustrated, not feeling the magic I remembered. I then opened the book and started reading for myself. And that’s when I realised the problem with sparknotes.

There are two basic parts to any good story. First, there is a conflict that must be addressed: a question, some sense of foreboding; the tension that keeps you curious. Second, there is the takeaway: the moral, what you remember from the piece; the lesson that reshapes your life.

The problem with sparknotes, and plot summaries by extension, is that it often neglects the conflict part of the story. In the process of being succinct, it rushes to the takeaway, the moral or plot twist you tell your friends about, and ignores the details that made the takeaway important in the first place. A moral like “recognise when you have enough” falls flat on most people. But when you turn that into a novel like The Pearl by John Steinbeck, with a plot and drama and emotion, suddenly you have a wonderful story.

Take this sparknotes summary of the first chapter of The Brothers Karamazov:

“Alexei Fyodorovich Karamazov, usually called Alyosha, is the third son of a brutish landowner named Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, who is still famous for his dark and violent death. The narrator tells the story of Fyodor Pavlovich’s life. As a young man, he is known as a loutish buffoon. He owns a very small amount of land and earns a reputation for sponging off other people.”

It’s a fine summary; the main points are there, and most literary critics would agree with this description of Fyodor Pavlovich. But compare that summary with this passage from the actual book:

“Alexey Fyodorovich Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovich, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men’s tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district…“

What does this passage have that the summary doesn’t? For one, it gives us a better picture of Fyodor Pavlovitch’s character: where the summary simply states a “loutish baffoon”, the book itself describes him as a “strange type… a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless”. It then further shows that though he began with nothing, he became very wealthy at his death, despite his apparent incompetence. Immediately, we wonder how a man who is so senseless and poor could amass such amount of wealth in his life. We are drawn into the story: we become curious. When these details are missing in the summary, we lose interest in the greater lesson at hand.

The problem with summaries is they skip the conflicts that make a book interesting and skip straight to the takeaway. Without the contradictions and tension that one can only build with detail, we simply don’t care. It is far more memorable to imagine Fyodor Pavlovich’s vicious, senseless nature in front of us, and to picture him curiously dying with riches, than to imagine a “loutish baffoon”.

The magic of reading lies in the process of caring deeply about a question, becoming curious about it, as the author intended, then realising the wisdom hidden in the text. To skip the question is to skip the answer entirely.