The Power Of Book Notes

We put a lot of work into our book notes resources, to help buyers to get a more thorough understanding of what they are studying. It’s just one part of our catalog of premier study aids, but it’s an important one. Remember the old grade school days when you put on a costume and gave a short book report on whatever you had read? Those reports were fun, but they also serve the purpose. The purpose is to give a broad overview of a piece of literature, to show what is happening at a general top-level view, to guide the reader as he or she moves through the world that the writer has created.

Comprehensive Views Of Reading

A novel is an expansive and complex work of art. Novels aren’t meant to be read in an hour – they’re meant to be enjoyed over a longer period of time, typically at least several days, or sittings. What happens, though, is that readers can get lost in the details and lose the overarching plot (this is different from “getting lost in a book” through engagement, which is fun!). This is especially true with world literature because you're so often delving into cultures and societies that are dissimilar to your own in many ways. Most of us are reading in our native languages – but it doesn't always seem that way, because so many of the customs and norms and ways of speaking that are treated are so different from what they are used to, that some readers just find their attention span waning, or find various parts of a piece of literature hard to grasp. Other factors include how engaged the reader is, or how long it is between times that he or she opens the book.

Bringing It All Together

Too many people think of a comprehensive book report as a shortcut to actually reading the material. That is not what this is supposed to be! Book notes are a companion to the book that helps illuminate that roadmap that the reader is following. As you move through the content, if you had any gaps in what you understand to be happening, you can fill those in with what you learn in the book notes. You can see and remember who the main characters are, and what the main events are in the plot. With any luck, that's going to get you more engaged with the underlying novel, not less. Take a look at this and everything else that we offer at Study Spark for the learner’s convenience and for advancing our understanding of literature.