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
How to Remember What You Read
61–70 of 97 posts
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#62The 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…
Honestly, I am amazed that there are people that don't do this.
I am often wondering how different the world looks through the eyes of someone else, and it's very hard for me to imagine how people can "go through the motions" without understanding in situations like you described.
Personally, I could never remember a fact or a word without understanding the concept behind it or its significance.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#63No, 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…
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Re: How to Remember What You Read
#64The 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.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#65Nabokov'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 b…
I found this related saying from Eco even more insightful (at least for me and for my particular case):
> The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
I've just turned 40 recently and I've started to realise that no, I won't get to read all the books that I already have in my library, but in the last few years (and especially during the pandemic) I think I've started to "accelerate" the purchasing of books related to fields of knowledge I'm interested in and of which I don't know that many things.
For example just yesterday I bought "The European Right: A Historical Profile" co-authored by Eugen Weber [1] because I've already read Weber's "Peasants Into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914" which I found highly interesting and because I found it interesting that in the 1960s (i.e. relatively shortly after WW2) the people were still seeing the proto-European fascists as being right-wing, nowadays they would just be called populists, in other words I was interested in reading in the 2020s a book written in the 1960s about an European political movement that took place in the early 1900s. There's a big chance I will not get to read that book in the next 2-3 years, but by just purchasing it and having in my head all the internal conversation I tried to summarise above has give me an extra "intellectual" (for lack of a better word) something.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#66> 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.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#67A
B
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#68Honest 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.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#69> 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…
Absolutely agree. My wife can read and remember everything, but is hard pressed to say how the elements fit into her life.
When I read I recall little but compile the experience as if holographically, enlarging my store of metaphors that surface unbidden as needed.
Re: How to Remember What You Read
#70> 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…
Absolutely agree. My wife can read and remember everything, but is hard pressed to say how the elements fit into her life. When I read I recall little but compile the experience as if holographically, enlarging my store of metaphors that surface unbidden as needed.
I think it might work the other way. Remembering more details prevents the reader from likening their own life to what they read because they can more easily recall the incompatible differences between the two.