## Why evaluating a book? Evaluating a book, before, during and after finishing it, is a way to get way more from it. This force us to think deeper about what it was, what we learned, what do we want to (and will) remember and improve our reading and comprehensive skills. ## Evaluate to choose what to read To observe a growth in our knowledge and reading skills, we need to choose books whose difficulty is just about our head. Bad books will be difficult to read because there's not so much to understand and analyse. As well, bad books don't reward struggles. Good books does: it improves our reading skills, we become wiser and will better know ourselves. There's book, that, more than just growing you as a person, appear to grow with you across time. When you re-read it (see [Re-reading books](Re-reading%20books.md)), it seems to have evolve so well that you can understand new things during the re-reading attempt. Just like a very good movie. There's 1 of 10 000 like these, even less. These are the ones we should find, choose and read. That's why we need to evaluate the book before choosing it. (See [The four levels of reading](The%20four%20levels%20of%20reading.md)). ## How to evaluate a book? [Reading technics should differ depending on book type](Reading%20technics%20should%20differ%20depending%20on%20book%20type.md), so the evaluation will also differ. But there's various things we can do that are independant from the book type: - Summarizing the entire book with a single sentence or a short paragraph by extracting the substantive marrow from it and explain how each part are connected to create a consistant book. This exerce our abstraction ability. - Outlining the book in our own word, better/tougher than the author's one. Some could be quoted, but we should mostly reformulate and complete the outline with short summary of what we understood and what had been said in each chapter. This will help memorizing and will act as a great start point of [Re-reading books](Re-reading%20books.md).