Why read books if we can’t remember what’s in them?

I can't relate. Snippets of books I read years ago often pop into my head at various times. On the other hand, I'm often stumped to remember where I put down my notebook five minutes ago.

My oldest boy (he is ten) just finished reading his first novel, which for him was quite an accomplishment. What my wife and I noticed after he finished the book was his writing skills improved significantly.

There is an easy analogy with food or exercise. The experience of eating a single meal or exercising a single day is forgotten, even while permanent changes to the body slowly accumulate.

Some people in this thread cite books they vividly remember from childhood. I suspect this is a result of the huge impact on a younger brain. In contrast a mature avid reader might have read 1000 books and an additional one is just not going to re-wire things as much even if the experience of reading it is richly rewarding.

A lot of the comments here about memory, recall, and learning are dealt with in Daniel T. Willingham's Why Don't Students Like School (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/047059196X?ie=UTF8&tag=...), which describes a lot of things, including how we move from a state of no knowledge to shallow knowledge to deep knowledge in particular problem domains. People with no knowledge and who have some introduced tend not to retain that knowledge well; people who have shallow knowledge tend not to connect that knowledge to other knowledge; and people who have deep knowledge can fit new information into existing schemas, webs, or ideas much more effectively than those who can't.

It's not an easy process, moving from one state to another, and it's also not a binary one. Willingham's focus is on how teachers can do this more effectively, but he also describes how people in general can or should.

I'm guessing that we can't remember books because many books give us relatively shallow knowledge and because most books have too many details for us to remember the finer points of them. But this probably changes over time: when I used to read fiction as a teenager or just after I started college, I mostly remember whether I liked the book or not. Now I'm in grad school for English and tend to remember the plots, how characters express themselves, the main conflicts in the novel and what those main conflicts signal, etc. So in reading Emma again this week, I realized that many of Austen's characters are actually judging themselves when they judge others, because their views of what is "right" or "proper" is mostly about preferences (and I actually wrote a post on the subject: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/jane-austen-emma-and-what-cha...). Now I'm likely to remember when Emma admits she's wrong and so forth.

Granted, I've read the novel before, but that happens with other novels too.

Finally, I now often write blog posts about books or take notes on them using Devonthink Pro as described by Steven Berlin Johnson: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/movabletype/archives/0002... . This dramatically increases retention.

Just to emphasize jseliger's last point, taking notes, specifically, writing reviews on books has helped me retain what I read more than I could have possibly imagined.

While I'm reading I try to keep myself in a frame of mind of a book reviewer. What will I want my audience to know about this book? What do I agree with or disagree with? What are the highlights? I sometimes take notes while I'm reading, but more often I just try to maintain that mindset.

When I'm done I write a quick 3 to 7 paragraph review and post it on GoodReads. Knowing that my review will be public forces me to take an objective look at my thoughts on the book, are they intelligible, consistent, relevant?

Writing the review also makes my conversation about the book more interesting and confident. And the more I talk about a book, the better I retain the information in it, so it's a double benefit. I've also found that reading the review a couple years later will quickly bring back more of the book than I get by just flipping through the pages or wracking my brain to remember what I read.

Writing a review on a book doesn't take long, maybe 20 minutes per book, it helps my writing skills and helps me read less passively. It's also pretty fun.