Unless you are savant you are not going to remember most of what you have read couple of months or years later however you are likely to have a vague recollection of the general gist o the book.
You are also not going to use most of the things you have read/learned in the book in real life. Unless you are only reading self-help type of books.
This is not normal. If you give a damn, you will retain good books; it's not magic. Think carefully about the ideas you read, write notes (if you like), and fit them into your mind.
You may remember good books vividly but there are a ton of mediocre books and bad books that are about as useless as any web page and as easily forgotten. I feel like sometimes people romanticize books far too much. I recently finished Eaarth by Bill McKibben and I felt like the whole book could have been nicely covered in a 10 paragraph blog post. It wasn't a bad book, not even very long, but I couldn't tell you much of anything about it other than "climate change is bad." I guess my point is you have to be pretty selective about the quality of books you read just as you need to be selective about the quality of web content you read. The plus side of the web is brevity makes the bad choices more tolerable. You don't spend days reading a bad web article hoping it might get better. (It got good reviews. It must be good. Just a few more pages...)
Everyone reads and learns at different speeds, but for me, M carefully considered books per year is better than N mostly forgotten ones, for all positive M and N.
You are eventually going to forget most of what you read few years later. So to me, the extra effort in trying to "remember" a book seems pointless.
To me relational connection is more important that "remembering" a book. For instance if you can point out "x event" in a book I have read (if it is a particularly interesting part of the book), I can give you a gist of what that x event in the book was talking about and things related to that event. I can also recall similar events in other books I have read. However if you ask me to remember a "hard number" or "hard fact" I will most likely not recall it.
"Remembering" a book seems like ridiculously thing to do unless its a programming book or you are preparing for an exam in school or work related.
This is an issue that I myself am grappling with. I read a lot in 2010. I probably read about 50 books. Some of them, I actively read: I kept my pen handy, underlined where appropriate and then wrote questions in the margins. If I made notes on a page, I would circle the page number; once I finished, I would flip through all of the pages with circled page numbers, and then dump all my notes into a plain text document. I would then try to assert some sort of cohesive logical structure on my dump, INTP-style, and then post it to ZacharyBurt.com.
I hate the feeling I feel when someone mentions an idea from a book I have read, me appraising it as so (fresh and different), and then me feeling that if I had to invoke that idea as part of a creative solution to a problem, it probably wouldn't have come to the forefront of my consciousness.
And of course, could I tell you the precise contents of many of those books? No. In fairness, Leonardo himself observed that genius requires spaced repetition. To that end, while reading, I have tried to build the habit of skimming ultimately irrelevant, unless needed for later reference, details. I still read them to evaluate whether they deserve a more in-depth look. But I am concerned here that my process is not ideal.
Has the reading bolstered my creativity and pattern matching ability? Probably.
Has it improved my analytic capacity? Probably, especially noticeable during the time period after I finish reading a book.
Do I remember the core lessons from each book? No.
And that's a big problem. Usually with a book I try to figure out a few different take-aways and then implement them into my life. But unless I implement them immediately and convert them into habits, I will probably lose the lessons. A challenge I face as a reader, and perhaps why I have accumulated a small following as a writer, is figuring out how to convert ideas from a book into actionable habits.
So what major life habit changes have I made in 2010?
I became vegan. That's it.
But I also made some changes to my business strategy, putting lots of money in my pocket.
And I became better at competitive sports.
I felt happy for greater intervals of time.
And my mental map of how my brain works has become more clear.
And hopefully, the books I choose to read next year will be ultimately more relevant useful and practical.
I have been planting seeds (for creative sprouting, which has paid some initial dividends). I have been also grasping for intellectual edification, trying to answer big questions that have been lurking in my head. Hopefully I will also start asking better questions instead of wasting time on the wrong questions.
Practically, I think that I could reduce each book I read into a few solid actionable ideas/suggestions. I may actually go through each of my blog's entries. If I eliminate rationale, I will be left with only results.. and people pay for results. Want to get the personal improvement of reading 50 books without having to compensate my ego by listening through my insufferable nerdy analysis? Get the PDF for $X.
I also have to figure out how I want to shift my reading strategy for 2011. Thoughts welcome.
It is true that everyone has their unique way of doing things, so I don't think there is a single "right" way of reading a book but a way that works for you.
But I want talk a little about the motivation behind reading books. I don't read books to be a genius or trying to solve a world problem or for the next big idea. I read purely out of intellectual curiosity and the pleasure of the reading experience. I also read mostly non-fiction books which I think requires a bit more mental involvement and slow reading than fictional books. I also don't speed read or skip parts.
>Do I remember the core lessons from each book? No.
>And that's a big problem. Usually with a book I try to figure out a few different take-aways and then implement them into my life. But unless I implement them immediately and convert them into habits, I will probably lose the lessons. A challenge I face as a reader, and perhaps why I have accumulated a small following as a writer, is figuring out how to convert ideas from a book into actionable habits.
I don't think there are enough original ideas out their that you will find in every single book you read that _you can apply in your life_. Specially in self-help books. If you have read 5-6 decent self-help (on time management, productivity) books chances are you have covered 95% of the important stuff out there. So instead of reading more self-help books to find something new or original (there are none, trust me) you are probably better off concentrating on the core lessons. Any more self-help books you will read will only reinforce the core ideas you already know about. You can also read them to get a different perspective of the known ideas too. I used to subscribe to every single popular self-help blog and have read most popular self-help books (before and after 2009). I also used to make rigorous notes. Over time I have fine tuned my notes and they have all comes down to three points.
Step 0: Say Calm.
Step 1: Decide what you want to do.
Step 2: Do it.
Of course this won't help everyone. But I know that those three point _really_ means. What it means to stay calm or why I should do it. What it means to emphasis on the _decision_ of what I want to do. And what it means to do something "I have decided" I will do. I don't have to remember the core messages of those books to apply the lessons I have learned.
But this is just one example on one type of books. I could use the same example to my other favorite topics "Theoretical Physics" and Neuropsychology". After reading a decent amount of theoretical physics books on cosmology even the latest book by Stephen Hawking felt like "meh". When you read 10th book on cosmology that tells you the same thing by 10 different authors in 10 different ways, at that point you are not reading to "learn something new", you are looking for a different perspective on the same thing you already know. You might not consciously "remember" all the 10 different ways to explain the same thing, but subconsciously you have 10 different ways of thinking about the same problem.
I think going out of your way to actively 'remember' what you read and trying to learn something from each book you read and apply them to your life is a wasted energy and effort (IMHO). Chances are most of them are not applicable to your life.
What good is knowing the best way to do something if you don't actively apply the knowledge? You essentially do not have the knowledge since knowledge includes physical knowledge of being able to act on it in the moment.
Get knowledge -> immediately apply habit in most effective pattern -> Get more knowledge -> immediately apply habit in most effective pattern -> Harder Better Faster Stronger
I too only read non-fiction. I would read a work of literature for pleasure. I do not want to know everything about everything but I want to know a little about everything to ensure that I know what I don't know.
I want to avoid negative Black Swans and capture positive Black Swans.
I really don't want to sound dismissive or pretentious; but thats the kind of thinking I used to have when I was a teenager. When you reach a certain age (or perhaps also gather a good amount of life experience) you soon realize what a naive way of thinking it is.
Of course everyone has their own philosophy in life. As an Active Nihilist, being "Harder Better Faster Stronger" is not important to me. Having the knowledge and knowing that "if I wanted to I could" is good enough for me.
>What good is knowing the best way to do something if you don't actively apply the knowledge?
There is no inherent "meaning", "point" or "good" in anything you do. You give your actions and choices a meaning. You chose to be "Harder Better Faster Stronger" because for some reason you find meaning in that. To me thats meaningless endeavor.
To me there is no "meaning" in reading books and gaining knowledge. I do it for the pleasure of it.
A lot of people who achieve a minor level of success adopt this sort of "if I wanted to I could" attitude, and it's usually rooted in self-delusion rather than tested empirical knowledge.
I remember maybe a little more than half of them, and perhaps 1/6 of them fundamentally changed my thinking enough that I'd be able to remember in detail (you can quiz me on them if you want an accurate sample). However, 1/6 of 150 books is still 25 books. There seem to be a bunch of people on this thread who would love to read 25 books/year, let alone remember them in detail.
If you read business books for example, you don't have to memorize everything you read in them. If you retain the main idea of the book and perhaps a few examples where that idea has been applied, it's good enough.
But even that is not necessary with all the books you read, as long as the ideas in those books remain somewhere in your unconscious mind. Later, when you'll be faced with a business decision, you'll just "know" what the right decision is, without having to pinpoint where you've heard that before. If you can get at least that from the books, it should be good enough and valuable for you in the long term.
You are also not going to use most of the things you have read/learned in the book in real life. Unless you are only reading self-help type of books.