About Us

Sara Carey once said, “Never mistake knowledge for wisdom. One helps you make a living; the other helps you make a life.”

Keeping her words in mind, we believe that the ultimate goal of reading books is not just to gain information, but also to use what we learn in order to better understand ourselves and the world—to improve our lives.

If you want books to add value to your life, then the Insightful Reader website is here to help you. Insightful Reader offers book summaries, analyses and other reading materials that invite you to learn what you need from the books; to think about the world and where you want to be in this world; to transform your knowledge into wisdom and make a life and not just a living.

Book Summaries and Reviews

Why should you read book summaries and reviews? Because you might discover that a book summary is all you really need or that reading the summary will help you decide to invest your time and money into reading the whole book. If you have already read the book, then the book summary and analysis can help you review and reflect on what you have read.

In today’s world overloaded with information, such a strategy makes sense. Unfortunately, many book summaries that you can find out there are like “fast food” for the brain. Filled with snippets of information extracted from books, they provide limited “nutritional” value for the mind, and it is doubtful that they can make you “smarter in no time.”

More than three hundred years ago, John Locke wrote, “Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.” We believe that his point remains a sound one today. This is why we offer our readers more than just quick, “in-the-blink-of-an-eye” summaries. We design book summaries, reviews and analyses that help you learn and think about a book’s ideas, reflect on its content and expand your knowledge beyond that gained from the book and its summary.

Here is how we do that:

1. We introduce the reader to a summary of a book, reviewing the book’s important data, ideas and points of view.

2. We do our own investigation beyond the book, gathering and presenting more data and facts relevant to the topics covered in the book.

3. We critically analyze the book, compare our findings with the facts and arguments presented in the book, and invite the reader to think about them as well. Opinions expressed in the analysis of the book may or may not agree with our readers’ opinions, and this is to be expected. There are as many opinions as there are readers. However, we think that facts and arguments that we present can enhance your reading experience even if you disagree with our opinions. They may persuade you to change your point of view or they may give you one more reason to believe that your point of view is the correct one.

On the Insightful Reader website, you can also find articles that address various topics in history, philosophy, economics, business and finance, science, popular psychology, and other subjects. In these articles, we review information, and compare and analyze facts, arguments and points of view from books and other sources.