The person who says of a novel that he has “read enough to get the idea” does not know what he is talking about. He cannot be correct, for if the novel is any good at all, the idea is in the whole and cannot be found short of reading the whole. But you can get the idea of Aristotle’s Ethics or Darwin’s Origin of Species by reading some parts carefully, although you would not, in that case, be able to observe Rule 3.
The individual parts make the whole. You can't understand enough to summarize without understanding the unity in structure, which you can't fully understand until you've understood the details.
