The point of this site is to help folks get some mileage out of some books and articles that might be a chore to read by themselves. The topics that the books and articles this site will cover are about are important, too important to abandon to the few nerds with the time, training, or inclination to pore over academic writing all day. Everybody should be able to understand and participate as peers in conversations that reference this shit.
Ideally, the posts here would be used as supplemental material, to be read alongside the source material. They’d basically be review, helpful for making the major points stick. But it’s not an ideal world, and people have shit to do, so the entries on this site are written to stand alone. Don’t get me wrong - sometimes authors just love to hear themselves talk, or dazzle readers with wordplay and jargon, and the texts are actually longer and more involved than they really had to be, so you really aren’t missing much by just reading summaries. But sometimes shit is just hard, and the topics are every bit as complicated as the author makes them out to be, and you can’t really do them justice without hearing all of what they had to say. But, better than nothing! Happy reading.