How to Remember What You Read (opens in new tab)

Nabokov's solution to this dilemma, reread. The only good reader is, as he said, a re-reader. If we're honest nobody can actually remember more than a dozen books, and if you pick the right ones there's more to learn in any of them than you can learn in years.

It's similar to the sentiment that the only way to understand a poem is to be able to recite it from memory, or the fact that some pianists play nothing else but Bach and yet reach mastery. Everything's already in there, or most of it anyway.

Requires a different mentality, one that treats reading or perception and deep study as the thing to care about, not 'absorbing information' or 'knowledge'.

Umberto Eco once pointed out that the size of the unknown, the books one has not read are magnitudes larger than the books one has read, so to treat knowledge as some sort of priced possession to climb in the pecking order is meaningless, what matters is being adequate in understanding the few things one actually has the time to study.

> Because when you’re finally in a situation where you could use its insights, you’ve completely forgotten them.

I once read a short essay by Patrick Süskind (author of "Perfume - The Story of a Murderer"). I am paraphrasing, but in it, he discusses his embarrassment that he cannot remember even major plot details or character names of great works of world literature, although he has read them multiple times and they deeply inspired his own work. He then makes an interesting speculation: if a book really and deeply influences you, then maybe actively remembering facts and insights of the book becomes harder and harder, because the book's ideas have been so deeply ingrained into your brain and thinking that you cannot remember them as facts independent of your thinking. But this doesn't mean that you have "forgotten" them.

The way to remember what you read is to make sure you understand all the words in the text, the way they apply in context.

It's the micro-misunderstandings that lead up to the macro-misunderstanding which manifests as "forgetting".

Other commenters also mention applying what's in the book. That is 100% true, when you're reading about how to do something. If you're reading a fact-based book (non-fiction) but not about doing something I usually take a break from the text and think about how it would apply to the subject I'm studying. But it's just obvious that you can't get a concept if you don't understand the words that describe it.

The target is conceptual understanding. It's got nothing to do with memorization. TO get the meaning of a song, for instance, it's not necessary to memorize the lyrics.

One real-world example, I was taking care of my father in the hospital and I noticed one of the techs telling him that he needs to order his dinner from the "dysphagia" menu. I asked her if he could have some other soft foods from home and she said, "all I know is that he needs to order from the menu." I asked her what dysphagia means, honestly I didn't know. She didn't know. I looked it up and told her it means "difficulty in swallowing". She realized that she never actually understood the concept of WHY one needs to order from the menu. As if the food is somehow magic. So that helped her understand the concept of the rule, and why it applies and I am sure she hasn't forgotten it.

I don't take notes, mark up pages or speed read or use any crutch, trick or technique to study. I just get the definitions of words that I don't understand and I do just fine.

> Mark up the book

Good for a book's first reader. What I really hate is browsing a used bookstore and finding something interesting or ordering a used book online, only to find it covered in markings (especially as some readers seem to highlight the most banal things). Very distracting.

I usually can't bring myself to mark up my own books for fear that I will distract my future self (or some other future reader if I sell or donate it), but will take notes separately. Although I've found that most books usually have hardly anything at all worth noting, and I'm not sure taking notes for its own sake, without any idea of its future usefulness, is necessarily worth it. Perhaps the hope is that a bunch of random knowledge just sitting in your memory will somehow automatically make itself useful when the time comes, which to be fair happens now and then, but usually if its not useful for very long, into the land of the forgotten it goes.

The best way to remember what you read is to apply it. If you read a book about programming in python and you want to retain that knowledge, write a program in python.

Unfortunately writer's writing advice for other writers but pretending like it's for everyone is too common.

>> 1. Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.

Maybe, or if you read the wrong thing, get a bunch of dumb ideas in your head that you would have been better off not having and nothing to counter act that can mess you up.

Furthermore, quality is hard to gauge ahead of time.

>> Speed-reading is bullshit. Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things. Confuse them at your peril.

That's hyperbole. When I read about speed reading it suggests that you vary your reading speed according to the subject matter. e.g. if you are reading Atlas Shrugged(if that's your cup of tea), I highly recommend speed reading through certain parts(you'll know when you get to them).

>> Book summary services miss the point. A lot of companies charge ridiculous prices for access to vague summaries bearing only the faintest resemblance to anything in the book. Summaries can be a useful jumping-off point to explore your curiosity, but you cannot learn from them the way you can from the original text.*

Depends on why you are reading the book. (e.g. Unfortunately much of school was nonsense, this can help with that).

>> Fancy apps and tools are not needed. A notebook, index cards, and a pen will do just fine.

Fancy apps and tools can be a purpose of their own. If a fancy note taking tool helps motivate you to take notes, and note taking is useful for you, you should get a fancy note taking tool. This is a personal decision.

>> We shouldn’t read stuff we find boring. Life is far too short.

Sometimes that nugget you need is in a boring book. I thought this wasn't reading for entertainment.

>> Finishing the book is optional. You should start a lot of books and only finish a few of them.

Yes finishing the book is optional.

> Quality matters more than quantity.

> Finishing the book is optional.

I find this amusing because I remember (I don't know why I remember), reading an article posted on HN essentially suggesting the opposite. Something along the lines of: not trying to absorb the whole book if it's stopping you from making progress, better to finish something than read nothing, it was argued better and felt convincing at the time... It sort-of clicked because I do have a bunch of unfinished books that I find quite interesting, probably like most people. I usually get to a point where I stop because I feel like I'm just mechanically reading and not absorbing, and then get distracted...

I still haven't managed to force myself to just carry on, it just doesn't feel right. However when I do make some progress, I feel enriched and think about it in the following days - and isn't that the point? so I guess I am in agreement with this article. I'd rather make incremental progress on these books that matter to me, and actually assimilate the ideas, than get all the way to the end and only have a vague sense of what it was about. Maybe one day I will have the luxury of re-reading them front to back.

Or, perhaps they are both good strategies, but for different things. Slow for depth, fast for breadth - if you want to expose yourself to a wider variety for discovery, go fast. If you found a good quality book and know you like it, go slow.

I really dislike this article:

>Quality matters more than quantity. If you read one book a month but fully appreciate and absorb it, you’ll be better off than someone who skims half the library without paying attention.

Let's measure outcomes instead. Choose between these two scenarios:

1) I spend one month reading a book closely and I follow some memory enhancing technique to retain the material - book club style. I can verbally retell the main points of the book afterwards and discuss it intelligently with others who have done the same.

Or

2) I had a quick look at the book and it's outline, I placed it conceptually in it's genre and in relation to other books covering the same kind of material. I had a normal reading of the chapters that seemed most valuable. I found one actionable insight and immediately worked it into my own set of habits/techniques/schedule. All in all I do this in 1-2h. I do this for 5 books a month.

After a year, I suspect strategy 2 has a better yield.

I was going to suggest a zettelkasten but while reading this noticed the author namedropped "How to Take Smart Notes" by Sönke Ahrens*.

Basically, when you take notes, summarize them in your own words. Look at a tool like Obsidian which uses markdown to save notes in plaintext. Look at people using this on YouTube if you want to dive deeper into the ecosystem.

* https://www.google.com/search?q=smart+notes+ahrens+site:news...

This whole article is too long. If you want to remember something while you read, the only advice is simply to take notes as you read. If you are on a paper book, you could take notes directly on the paper. For digital reading, use a wiki system or any kind of note taking tool to grab interesting points of what you read before you forget them. And re-read your notes on a regular basis.

I use Readwise and honestly it's been game-changing. I highlight quotes out of books I'm reading in my Kindle, and everyday, Readwise sends me a random selection from quotes I've highlighted in the past. Such a simple idea, very low effort, but I definitely retain and absorb a lot more than I did before.

A good way to remember what you read is to become a domain expert and read everything about some particular domain you are interested in.

When you read in clusters around the same topic the same concepts will get reinforced over and over again.

> Fancy apps are not needed

Not sure if Anki counts as fancy, but it certainly is orders of magnitude more efficient than taking notes or active reading. See also: Make It Stick [1]. If you're trying to memorize content spaced repetition is unmatched. I've durably memorized entire 300-page programming design books (e.g. Effective Java) in under a month of 30 min/day reading+Anki usage.

[1]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18770267-make-it-stick

> Consuming information is not the same as acquiring knowledge

Yes but this:

> Getting the rough gist and absorbing the lessons are two different things.

I only partially agree with. I organize my knowledge using zk, and go through a) writing notes as I read then b) digesting them into ideas. Most books I read cover to cover prior to doing that, I remember only the gist of ; while books I occasionally speed read doing that, I remember in more details.

My point is: it's not just about "going on a trip" with the author, but appropriating yourself their ideas.

The 3rd 'truth about reading' in this article states that:

  "Book summary services miss the point."

Then a couple of lines below, we are given this disclaimer:

  "By the way, the book summaries we write for Farnam Street members are definitely not in the same class as the standard fare." 

As the old saying goes, 'people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones'!

The article presupposition is misleading.

Forgetting is good. This what makes our brain grow.

You read to train it, not to be a walking reference book.

It took me a while to learn this. In college however I found I would read something and think, "Yeah, I totally understand this." and then need it later to find I didn't really understand it at all.

For me taking notes is a big part of it. For scientific papers reading the cites and then re-reading the paper helps cement things. For fiction I just seem to remember them and that makes re-reading kind of irritating/boring so not as keen on re-reading those.

But as the article touches on, for me it is the "why" sometimes that is key. Mathematics rarely sticks in my head unless I have a specific application for which the math is useful.

It's important to distinguish books you need to understand/remember versus casual reading. If you need to retain and understand then please take notes, re-read, explain the book to someone (Feynam method), etc.

If you're just reading casually, the content you retain from a book will be proportional to your interest not the speed with which you read it. Some parts of the book you will forget and others you will remember for the rest of your life even if you only read it quickly once.

> The best technique for notetaking is whichever one works for you and is easy to stick to.

Although this article is full on tips on how to take notes, this is the tip that stuck out the most for me. I've tried many different strategies to take notes and how to remember them. I figured out that the thing that worked best for me was actually to keep note taking as simple as possible. The more "steps" [1] I use during note taking, the more structure and rules I try to add to my notes [2], the worse everything gets. The more steps I have to take to make a note, the less likely it is that I'll make that note. The technique for notetaking that works best for me is, maybe paradoxically, also the simplest to perform: I take notes with pen and paper and review the notes now and then, nothing more, nothing less. This way of taking notes works (for me) and is easy to stick to.

[1] - https://fs.blog/2013/11/taking-notes-while-reading/

[2] - https://www.amazon.nl/dp/1542866502?tag=farnamstreet-20

I built a webapp and a startup to do that :D Students report that they learn from 1.5x to twice as fast if they highlight with our tool by themselves, 2x to 3x+ if the content is already curated by a peer. It's highlighting with text extraction into a pyramid structure, patented in the EU, pending in the US. Would be interested in feedback should anyone be willing to try: https://kjuicer.com You can use it on html pages or put content inside the editor. It can't import yet. Please ping me if you need help using it.

To remember what you read, following two works for me:

1. Map it to your life or people or situations somewhere..

2. Explain it to yourself..

But I usually don't read books about my core areas, I like to learn about them practically and by facing things. Someone else's experience about it would bias my mind.

One bit from this post was on taking notes. I’ve purchased several nice notebooks (moleskine, Baron Fig, etc) to use but I always hate how jumbled my commonplace notes got and I’d quit. Most of these notebooks are 25% completed.

I bought a reMarkable 2 earlier this year and have loved it. I have a notebook per subject and I can append to each without carrying multiple paper notebooks or getting upset by the lack of organization in a single commonplace notebook.

If you like paper but hate disorganization, and have the disposable income, give it or another eInk tablet a try.

I highly disagree with "no starring mid air" in the focus section. It's something I do a lot, sometimes because I think about something I just read, sometimes because my mind goes travelling for a bit, which is a good side effect of reading (as opposed to infinite scrolling in social media which doesn't let you look up). there is a good Ted talk about it ("how to get your brain to focus" or something like this) which proves that your mind needs to wander in order to stay healthy and creative.

The individual guidelines are good, but the motivating context is missing a crucial ingredient: genuine curiosity. Reading to tick the box of having read something is a tough sell to convince your memory to weave the new knowledge in usefully.

When you read to gratify and challenge your own curiosity, you stitch insights into an ever-widening framework which is naturally self-reinforcing as you continue your journey forward. To that end, I’d add another guideline (which the author dances close to): ask questions, seek answers.

The importance of reading is as much about how it shapes your understanding as remembering discrete facts. I'm not necessarily great at recall of characters names in novels, or specific dates in history, but I'm quite good at abstracting the high level meaning of something. It means that, whilst I may not win as many general knowledge quizzes, my actual understanding of things I read tends to be ok. This strikes me as much more important.

That said, it would still be nice to have better recall of facts for sure.

Ironically I've just bookmarked this article to read later because I got past the intro and can't be bothered to read anymore ;P

I don't understand where advice like finishing the book is optional comes from. Anyone who's ever written anything of some length and gone through the publishing process with copy editors would recognize that stories are told in coherent pieces. If a book isn't meant to be finished it isn't meant to be read. Move on.

I believe is using the tech and apps for remembering what I read. I recently started using Readwise app for getting all my important sections from different books into daily dose of reminders. It works well. I also use Notion for auto syncing of book highlights.

I don't think it's fair to eliminate technology from reading. Use it for your advantage.

I think a lot of this is true not only for books, but also for articles.

I've started trying to be more selective with the online content I choose to spend my time on, and then conserve takeaways from the articles I read (like this one).

Of course sometimes you just want entertainment, in which case this isn't worthwile.

Honest question: why would you want to remember what you read? Instead take notes or use post-it notes to mark the interesting bits and you can always come back to them, given you have a good enough system for storing and linking. You can't rely on your memory anyway.

Nice opinion piece.

Related: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/how-to-talk-about-books-you-ha...

I've had some success using the Kindle app highlight feature - highlighting key points as I go along, and then later reviewing just my highlights (which can also be exported). You can add notes to the highlights too.

No, actually, faster reading often helps with better retention.

Also, taking notes, marking up a text etc are in my opinion a waste of time. If the author did his job right you should be marking up 100% of the words, and when taking notes you should be copying the book almost verbatim.

If you absolutely need to have a high recall, I recommend to start with a recital based approach. Read a section, then try to recite the topic freely. This works well for complicated or information-dense stuff. Less well for fluffy prose. If you want to go a step further, use loci-method with the latter approach.

Also, being interested in more effective learning techniques is highly correlated with diagnosed/undiagnosed ADHD. Just sayin'

Write stuff down, the act of writing it down and reading it more than once will help you remember

So, should I read this article before reading this article?