It's not unlike a memory palace -- rather than just read the fact, think on it, expand on it and give it context and a place to live in your brain.

Instead, if you want to remember the thought you were about to highlight or underline, write it out long hand, and from short term memory not copying rote, in a note book.

This exercises the full path: reading, comprehension, decision you’ll need to recall, storage, retrieval, and output from mental storage back into physical world.

Plus, the notebook then provides a hook for refreshing the information geography in your storage. Reskim the notes and you refresh the larger narrative and how it hangs together. Revisit the notebook on a periodically decreasing interval, you’ll still recall the narrative decades later.

> What use is it to read [hundreds of books in my life] if I remember so little from them? [...]

> Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists.

In the author's method, these are reinforced with marginal notes (for comprehension) and a post-reading writeup (to connect concepts). I suspect this to be significantly inferior to more in-depth note-taking, as a significant amount of information may be lost in the time between reading chapter one and finishing the book, whereas complete notes should allow for immediate relation and processing. A high quality book will be organized to assist the reader in relating concepts, and waiting until book completion to prioritize this defeats the purpose of reading a book rather than a collection of disparate articles.

Still, the author is absolutely correct in that active reading is a worthwhile habit, and you should try to find an optimal method for your learning tendencies; While for me focusing on repetition and post-read review is brutally inefficient, everyone learns differently, so it may be perfect for you.

An example is here[0] but basically I keep notes on:

Places

Things

Characters

Plot

Nothing too long and it's all filled in in a few seconds in an Evernote notebook/note as I read along.

The main reason this is effective for me is that I can very quickly look up a character/place/plot in one single place in just a few seconds.

Often I don't need to re-read the whole thing, just the 'recent past' bits to quickly remember where I was in the plot after I put the book down for a week or two.

It ends up looking like a lot but it's more a consequence of doing a little a lot of times rather than a large amount of burdensome work.

I'm not sure if it helps long term retention, but it does help short term and it certainly helps comprehension when I've forgotten some characters significance or minor but consequential plot point.

[0] https://www.josharcher.uk/blog/diaspora-greg-egan-book-revie...

I don't highlight analysis and commentary. I don't highlight how the author reached a certain conclusion, just the end result.

Some examples of what I am highlighting while reading On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins:

"This is the neocortex, a thin sheet of neural tissue that envelops most of the older parts of the brain."

"the neocortex is about 2 millimeters thick and has six layers,"

"Stretched flat, the human neocortical sheet is roughly the size of a large dinner napkin. The cortical sheets of other mammals are smaller: the rat’s is the size of a postage stamp; the monkey’s is about the size of a business-letter envelope."

I wish there was a good way to transfer these highlights from my Kindle into Anki flashcards automatically (if someone knows a way to do this, I'm happy to hear from you). It feels like a chore right now, so I often forget to do it.

Set an alarm to go off every few minutes. When the alarm goes off shut the book and summarise what you read in the past few minutes. Writing it down helps keep you honest (if you do it in your head its very easy to fool yourself). After you summarise start reading again.

Forcing yourself to practice recall helps memory. Being interrupted helps memory too. You don't need any fancy software, just a timer.

1. Highlight the passages that are important along the way

2. After each chapter I try to summarize its important points and any challenges I have to them.

3. Over multiple chapters, I have a section at the top "Key Ideas" with the top 5-10 points over the course of the book.

4. After the book is done, I edit the doc to include a "My Thoughts" section and gather all my critical thoughts into one place. This is probably the most valuable.

Overall, even if I don't remember the details of a book, now I have a collection of summaries that I can pull up to remind myself about each book if it comes up again later and I need a refresher.

As a bonus, it's super easy to write a review of the book afterward because you have all the pieces almost already in place.

https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/home/we...

Reading changes your brain; in brain connections are continually created while synapses that are no longer in use degenerates. Or in other words you are a very different person today just by reading all those books in all those years, that you don't remember anything of now.

Repetition and flashcards will help you remember the content, but it won't help you understand it. That's only done by actively engaging with the content and connecting it to and comparing it with other facts and ideas.

The summarising, keeping lists of questions, and writeups will help you understand the content, and I think is the only valuable part of this process. Why rote memorise when you have lovely writeups you can refer back to.

I find Luhmann's Zettelkasten method, as described in 'How to Take Smart Notes' more persuasive. As you read make bibliographic notes in your own words (on page X it says Y), store these in one place for everything you read. Also note down key ideas as you read with cross references to the bibliographic notes, and to other key idea notes that are relevant; store all these notes in another place. When you're filing a key idea have a look for similar ideas already noted; is this the same? Supporting? Contradictory? These questions help engage with the content. Over a lifetime you can amass a treasure chest of ideas that you can refer back to at your leisure, as Luhmann did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

OneNote/Evernote is especially helpful when you use handwritten idea maps (e.g. https://1drv.ms/u/s!AvGG5UqSCqXTnjq9_pD_gb7SJPce). I can't run out of space on my page and I can easily modify the contents if I find better material down the road.

https://www.amazon.com/How-Read-Book-Classic-Intelligent/dp/...

Now, I did take notes and we did write papers but I think the key to it is really: I explained it to other people. Either in class or socially (probably some people considered it boring but it was a nerdy school and it wasn’t uncommon.)

Today people need youtube tutorials to show them how to edit a 10 line configuration file. A (video) tutorial explaining to them how much time they lose watching videos instead of reading would be more appropriate.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16364423

for a non-professional book, it's the idea behind the story or the art of writing or both, that values. if you can't explain what you've read, i think it's most likely you haven't catch the main idea of the story rather than the story itself.

If you download Kindle Mate (kmate.me), you can import your Kindle highlights to your PC and export them as a text file. Then you could make a script that parses this file line by line and saves it as a csv-file. Then use Anki csv-import.

EDIT: fixed the link.

You could then bulk import them, possibly after some minor formatting manually or with a script

https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#importing-text-fil...

You would still have to go trough them and add cloze delitions.

If it's possible to add notes to your highlights you might be able to specify delitions there and then parse them.

I might actually do this myself for fun :)

Wouldn't the result be actually opposite from anticipated? It's exactly writing about the stuff by yourself a way for remembering it. It won't stick if you just automate the process. Or rather it will, for long enough to deceive you into thinking you know it, but you'd probably forget it after a while anyway. Writing anything by yourself, or ideally handwriting, makes it stick. At least it works for me. I spoke with some friends of mine and this system seems to work for them, either.

When I left academia to move cross country, I had a yard sale and at the end of the day a few hundred books were left over.

A young man who had come by earlier still had some interest in the books and so I bequeathed them to him.

Then I moved cross country.

Over five years later, I received a FB message from someone who asked if I had ever taught English in Ohio, and I confirmed that I had.

He replied he wanted to thank me because he was the recipient of those books. He was a Ph.D. student in Math and he read many of the books he got from me and said he learned so much about literature and writing that he never would have as a result of the notes in my margin.

I was humbled that he found my scrawlings worth reading and even more humbled he was able to learn something from them. I honestly think his intelligence was the real key driving his learning, but I am beyond grateful that whatever notes I left in the margins of those books provided enough information to encourage a self-motivated learner to think deeply about the works he was reading.

So while some may find annotations distracting and annoying, there are some that can find those same annotations to be pointers to a fuller understanding of the material so annotated.

EDIT: Change "and" to "to be" in last sentence.