Now this could be an interesting week..!

I love the book of Ecclesiastes. It's known as one of the most miserable books in the Bible, but where others see only doom and gloom, I consistently find reassurance that my bleaker thoughts are not outside of what Scripture comprehends.

I first discovered Ecclesiastes in the midst of teenage depression. Until that point I'd thought that the Bible was all rules, platitudes and miraculous stories (how little I knew!). I was astonished to find a book that more than understood my fairly negative take on the world.

"Meaningless, meaningless, everything is meaningless!" (Ecclesiates 1.2)

Ecclesiastes has been a touchstone for me ever since. And I've found as much treasure in it for the highs as for the lows.

A number of months back I was invited to contribute study notes for a forthcoming edition of the Youth Bible. I was unsurprised to find that Ecclesiastes was still available and I jumped at the chance.

I had recently started Bible Summary, and I decided to skip ahead and write chapter summaries as a way of getting to grips with the key themes. So I'll be starting Ecclesiastes tomorrow with a provisional set of summaries for the whole book.

It will be interesting to see how many of the provisional summaries make the final cut. (And, for that matter, how much of what I wrote for the Youth Bible makes the final publication. I'll let you know when it comes out!)

"Of the making of books there is no end." (Ecclesiastes 12.12)

Chapters 10 to 29 of Proverbs pose two particular challenges for the discerning Bible summariser:

Firstly, the lack of structure.

Chapters 1 to 9 have a very coherent overall theme - wisdom against folly - and each chapter develops an aspect of the theme. By contrast, in chapters 10 to 29 there are about a dozen main themes, which are mixed together verse by verse with no apparent order.

My method for the project so far has been to build a summary around the key themes of each chapter. But there don't seem to be themes in these chapters!

Secondly, the irreducibility of a proverb.

Individual proverbs are actually very well suited to Twitter as a medium. Most proverbs are 140 characters or less, and they convey a single, clear idea through a pair of contrasting examples.

But I'm trying to summarise an entire chapter of proverbs in each tweet. It's very difficult to reduce the length of a proverb without losing precisely the grit that makes it profound in the first place.

So, what am I going to do?

I think I'm just going to pick the three or four images that strike me most from each chapter. I'll look for proverbs that capture the heart of one of the broader themes within the book, and over the course of the 20 chapters I'll aim to cover all the main themes.

I won't even try to preserve the pair-of-contrasting-examples form.

It will be interesting to see whether this exercise reveals structure that I haven't noticed before, or whether I'll be left feeling more than ever that it's impossible to do justice to Scripture within the constraints that I've imposed.