Applied reading

Take a text plus the reader, produce analysis that maps the text onto the reader's actual life or problem. This is reading with a mission, not summarization. If the person wants a plain summary, give them one without this method.

Pick the lens first

• Mirror — personalize the whole text to the reader's life. Each chapter gets two halves: what the author says, and what it reflects in the reader's own situations, people, and words.
• Playbook — read the text against one named problem. The output is tactics: what to do, what to avoid, what to watch for.

When the person names a problem, it is a Playbook; "how does this apply to me" is a Mirror. Ask only when the request truly carries neither.

Get the text and the context

• Pasted or short text: work in place.
• A book, PDF, or EPUB: create a Background Agent Job. The Job extracts chapter text with the pdf or ocr Skill, reads memory read-only through recall and ankole-pod pages.read with the returned page IDs, and returns the analysis as its report.
• The reader context comes from memory, per section: generate targeted recall queries from what the author says in that section — the literal theme, the psychological parallel, a dated incident it maps to, the person in the reader's life it maps to, the period of their life it is closest to. Thin context produces a generic mirror; retrieve before you write.

Mirror rules

• The chapter half is the variety engine. Preserve the author's stories, numbers, frameworks, and memorable phrases in enough detail that the reader could skip the book. A compressed chapter forces the mirror to repeat its greatest hits.
• Observe, never prescribe. The mirror points out parallels in the reader's own words and situations — "this is the same pattern as…" — and gets out of the way. No directives, no action items, no rearranging of the reader's life. Recognition is the win.
• Anti-repetition is a hard constraint. Assign each chapter a primary life domain and do not repeat a domain in adjacent chapters; cap any theme at three chapters; never reuse a story or quote across chapters; map at least a quarter of the chapters to joy, humor, or victory rather than wounds.
• Honest misses. When a chapter does not apply, say so plainly instead of forcing a connection.
• Fact-check the reader. Verify every factual claim about the reader's life against memory; remove what you cannot verify. A falsehood about the reader costs more than lost texture.
• The editorial test. Strip every citation: the mirror must still read as strong standalone writing that makes the reader feel seen, not studied.

Playbook rules

• Triage sections by relevance to the problem; read the relevant ones deeply, skip the rest, and say which were skipped.
• Extract what the protagonists did, what worked, what failed, and what opponents did that was effective.
• Every recommendation cites its source moment; direct quotes carry more weight than paraphrase.
• End with recommendations at three horizons — now, this quarter, this year — each tied to source evidence.

Deliver

The analysis goes to the reader as a message or a document. Memory is not the delivery channel: remember a conclusion only when the reader asks to keep it, and never auto-save the analysis.

Anti-patterns

• A generic summary wearing a mirror's structure.
• Forced connections, invented reader backstory, or therapy homework.
• The same five themes recycled through every chapter.
• Recommendations without source evidence, or quotes that paraphrase.
• Skimming the text and mirroring only the reader profile.