Ask HN: How much do you remember from books you read only once?

One book? Not much. Effective storytelling helps a lot, but only for fiction.

The trick is to read many interrelated books. Same topic, different words. Those variations on a theme let you quickly uncover the core message behind authors' styles. The repetition, with slightly different editorial choices, drills into your mind. Variations on a theme are what makes play so effective as well.

Take notes in a fixed ritualistic manner. Choose the ONE notebook you'll use; Write down the most important passages by hand in a slow, precise way. Most importantly, write a summary of the whole book and FIND CONNECTIONS between concepts from different books.

I have no scientific paper to show you. I read +-50 books every year and this is only my personal experience.

It depends on the book and whether or not I was impacted by it.

Just reading means I will recall something about the book, it's coverage domains, and maybe some higher level details.

If I work with material in the book, even once, what I remember is significantly improved.

Impact can be from that, working with material, or it can come from relevance to things I'm focused on. Sometimes, I read a book, and some parts of it end up being very relevant and I think about it and make connections.

I recall a lot of this, and do so in detail.

Your brain has a policy of use it or lose it. If what you are reading is relevant to what you are doing, you would remember it otherwise finer details would mostly evaporate rather quickly. This is not just about books but for other things in life too, for example, your past travels or people you meet day to day. Some people are fortunate to have photographic memory way in to their 30s but that's rare.

For most things in life, I would suggest using this philosophy: You don't want to or need to remember everything, rather you want to figure out what insight you attained from something. For example, after reading a book, writing down the summery, your opinions and insights at that point would help you more than remembering every detail. Some people use margin of the book or highlight passages that they find useful and that's good technique that really works. Similarly for your travels, instead of writing down every tiny details if you just maintain logs of surprises and insights you attained each day would be great way to remember it. Lot of people just go through one book after another and that's actually significant waste of time as you are not taking time to digest and reflect on the effort you put in to go through the thing. Writing things down jogs your memory, forces you to ask questions and brings up the critical insights that you are otherwise just passing by. In essence, 3 things helps you the most: write, write and write :).

Reading alone, even repeated reading, has been shown to be ineffective in committing information to long term memory.

You should be able to remember the basic story in a piece of fiction though.

Mostly everything, I just have trouble accessing it without a lead. But I can't read a book twice, as I instanty know what happens next.