Digests?

In Gospels, we've been tasked by Guy Waters to write a "digest" for each book assigned in class. I take it this was intended to capture the essence of the book, but I'm still a little fuzzy on the point of this exercise. It was not supposed to be a response or book review. And, we could do it in small paragraphs or in outline format. I opted for the outline.

However, outlining two 600-page books was not the simple process I thought it would be. In short, I now have 10-page outlines for Backgrounds of Early Christianity (Everett Ferguson) and Jesus and the Gospels (Craig L. Blomberg). But, I've not really read them nor did I retain anything. This was by far the most useless assignment I've done in seminary, and possibly in my entire graduate career.

See, my reading retention is so painfully poor that I make 3 x 5 index cards for every book or article I read. I started to do this with Ferguson, realized about 1/3 into the book that
I would never have enough time or space (10-page limit) to type it all, and proceeded to outline the rest based on subheadings and italicised points. Granted, I'm sure my index-card process could be more efficient, but I've got a reading and writing process that earned me one graduate degree and I'm not really keen on changing it all that much. I'm tempted to ask Professor Waters if I can just turn in my index cards for the next two books, or I'll never actually learn anything in this class. Well, that's not entirely true. From what I could tell of headings and subheadings, Waters is sticking pretty close to the books.

But I still don't have a paper topic and class starts in an hour and a half.