So many books, so little time. Is Blinkist the answer?
Image: Erik Mclean on Unsplash
The tower of unread books on my bedside table is growing. And with it, my guilt. I consider myself a ‘reader’, not someone who smugly displays books but never cracks the spines!
Not that my stack is particularly cool. There are parenting books, history books and a range of fiction books. Many are long overdue at the library. Some I actually want to read. But I can’t bring myself to start until I’ve dealt with the books on top.
Looking for a way to clear the backlog (booklog?), I remember an app a friend told me about. Called Blinkist, it offers to distil entire books into 15-minute reads (‘Blinks’) and corresponding audiofiles.
I sign up to Blinkist’s free 7-day trial, sit down next to my pile of shame and start searching. I try Michelle Mitchell’s popular Australian parenting book Tweens. Not available. What about Grantlee Kieza’s history of Mary Reibey? No. Anything by the prolific Mr Kieza? Nup.
I search any non-fiction Australian author I can think of. Guy Rundle? Leigh Sales? Julia Baird? Nope. As a last-ditch effort, I search for one of the biggest-selling Australian books of all time – Scott Pape’s The Barefoot Investor.
There it is! I read it ages ago, but I can spare 15 minutes to ‘blink’ it. The ‘main takeaway’, says the American narrator, is that ‘it’s possible to get a grip on your finances. You can even organise them so that after a few initial steps, the mechanics of investing take care of themselves’. Yet the useful details (like how to talk your bank into a lower interest rate) and the endearing laconic style of Pape’s book is gone.
I try a different tack. There’s one American book on my bedside table: Huckleberry Finn. I borrowed it from the library because our last book club selection, James, by Percival Everett, is a retelling of the seminal novel through the eyes of Jim, Finn’s black slave accomplice in the original.
Unsurprisingly, Huckleberry Finn is available as a Blink. And it’s quite listen-able. Narrated with a bit of flair, it peppers the boiled-down plot summary with lessons on how its form and themes have sparked controversy and ongoing moral debate.
Would listening to this Blink have made me more conversant with Huckleberry Finn and its relationship to James at our book club? Probably. I also ‘blinked’ 2 other classics, Moby Dick and Of Mice and Men, and now feel like I grasp their main concepts, plotlines and intent. Bring on the yuppy dinner parties!
But whose views would I be expressing? What do you cut, and what do you keep, when asked to summarise something? ‘It is insincere editing to give the customers something you don’t like yourself,’ said a Reader’s Digest editor from the 1950s, as quoted in a review of Blinkist in The New Yorker. Language and meaning are subject to human experience, taste and context – including, in this case, the need to wrangle Mark Twain’s classic into a saleable ‘product’ for Blinkist customers.
I learn from The New Yorker that Blinkist employs a range of freelancers to work as book summarisers, including PhD candidates, subject-matter experts, coaches and consultants. The article also explains how self-help was the company’s focus when it started back in 2013 and remains central to its approach. So, in the interest of research, I abandon my shame-pile and tuck into some self-help.
I ‘blink’ Hidden Potential by US author Adam Grant. In a nutshell? Attitude is everything: develop your character, be a sponge for learning and don’t forget the element of play. Good tips; maybe I should read the full book to understand how to ‘action’ this? But there I go again, adding to the pile of ought-to-read books.
I also ‘blink’ Philippa Perry’s best-selling The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read. I like the concepts – sorry, ‘takeaways’ – and decide to buy the full book on my Kindle. I get a lot out of it. Another benefit, perhaps, of Blinkist: a try-before-you-buy service. (Kindle does this too, but in the form of free chapter samples. These also allow you to gauge if you can tolerate the author’s writing style.)
Nonetheless, by the end of the 7 days, I decline the $AU99-or-so annual subscription. I don’t think Blinkist will miss me much: as of 2024, it had notched up 31 million downloads. Clearly, there’s a market for ‘boosting personal growth’ via bullet-point learning – it’s just not me!
I return all my unread overdue books to the library and confess to my mum that I don’t plan to read the books she’s lent me. Life is too short for book guilt – and most books are too good for ‘blinking’.