How To Actually Remember The Books You Read Ep101

In this episode, I talk about why so many people forget what they read—and how I’ve changed my habits to remember the books that matter. It’s not a trick or a hack. It’s just a way of treating books like relationships. You can’t know someone after one dinner, and you can’t know a book after one reading. Send Me a Text Message with Your Questions 👋📚Help us open the bookstore by donating a few bucks at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edgewaterbookstore/join-me-in-making-edgewater-bookstore-a-real-location Welcome to The Read Well Podcast, a weekly show dedicated to building a strong reading habit, improving research strategies, and learning intellectual ideas from the books you love. Your passion may be the wisdom of Plato, how to cook a curry, or the complex ideas hidden in Dostoevsky’s fiction. Whatever you’re researching today, this show is about helping you master the topic. You’ll find practical advice on how to take effective book notes, develop your annotation skills, and benefit from tools like a Zettelkasten or a second brain. So grab your favorite book, and let's get started.

In this episode, I talk about why so many people forget what they read—and how I’ve changed my habits to remember the books that matter. It’s not a trick or a hack. It’s just a way of treating books like relationships. You can’t know someone after one dinner, and you can’t know a book after one reading. Send Me a Text Message with Your Questions 👋📚Take Your Reading Deeper: https://community.thereadwellpodcast.com/deep-reading-community?el=podcast

Reading is more than just skimming words on a page; it's a complex process that involves understanding, remembering, and connecting ideas. If you've ever wondered how to actually remember what you read, you're not alone. Many struggle to retain information from books, articles, or studies. This guide will walk you through effective techniques and strategies to enhance your reading retention, making your reading experience more rewarding and impactful. Engage actively with the text by summarizing and asking questions as you read. Create a distraction-free environment to help focus and retain information better.

Use techniques like the Feynman Technique to break down complex ideas and reinforce understanding. Incorporate storytelling into your learning to make information more memorable. This post may contain affiliate links. Disclosure here. Do you also belong to the unfortunate group of people who forget what they read as soon as they read it? If so, congrats!

The upside is that you’ve found your people! With so many books to read, life responsibilities, and so much more happening, it can be easy for the details of a book to slip away. I’ve recently (after a lot of trial and error) discovered some simple ways to help remember what I’ve recently read. So let’s dive in and see if any of these tips can help you as well. Have you ever had someone ask what the current book you are reading is about, and all you can muster is, “Uh, good question…”? It’s pretty normal, actually.

Most people read books and then forget the details within days — sometimes minutes. Over the past few years, I’ve cobbled together a super simple three-step system to help you remember and use the best stuff from whatever you’re reading. Whether you’re reading one book a year or plowing through fifty, this system works. We all love highlighting stuff, right?Especially on Kindle — it’s just too easy. You swipe your finger, feel accomplished, and then… nothing sticks. Here’s the deal: Highlighting alone makes you feel like you’re absorbing things, but in reality?

Nope. Our brains aren’t made to remember everything that we encounter. Unless you’re one of the rare individuals who has a photographic memory, it’s likely that details about the content you consume fade quickly. How often do you recall reading an article, but forgetting what it’s about? Have you ever recognized a movie title but failed to remember the plot? If you frequently forget the things you’ve read and the movies you’ve watched, you aren’t alone.

Think about what you had for lunch yesterday or what you did last weekend. Those memories are probably blurry because they aren’t critical for your survival. Our brains have about 8 GB of capacity for immediate recall, and only the most essential information will make the cut. This can leave us with a blurred picture of nonessential information. Learn more about this in my other article: You’ve Been Using Your Brain Wrong: Human Brains Aren’t Designed to Remember Things The human brain is not designed to help you handle with massive amounts of data.

We’re bombarded with stimuli every day. If we processed and remembered everything, then it would probably make it difficult for us to function. Your brain sorts through all your experiences to weed out the significant and insignifcant things that we encounter.[1] It doesn’t matter how much you’ve been looking forward to seeing a movie or reading a book. Unless the content is linked to your survival, chances are that you’ll forget what you’ve seen or read soon after viewing it. I’m terrible at remembering what I read.

I’ve touched on this topic before when I wrote about David Bashevkin’s method for remembering the books that he reads, but I have, sadly, yet to implement his extremely thorough system for documenting the... I’ll see a book I remember having loved, but I simply cannot explain why I loved it or describe it beyond a very basic and often hazy overview. It’s a little better for nonfiction because I spend more time with nonfiction books, but even those tend to dissolve and dissipate with time. I think reading is, in and of itself, a worthwhile pastime, simply for the things it does for your brain and for the alternatives it stops you from pursuing (no, not drugs, I mean... I Read This Over Shabbos is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

When I complained to a friend about this, they reminded me of this Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: I cannot remember the books I have read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.

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