Highlights from the comments: should you take book notes?

I recently read Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han. It’s a really interesting book, even though I often disagree with Han, and I am planning on writing a full review, so look out for that!

But at the time I posted this note, I was struggling to read the book. Specifically, I was struggling with how to take notes on the book.

I grew up with undiagnosed ADHD: I didn’t start doing book notes until college, in which I developed a very particular style of notetaking—to meet the demands of churning out essays for my philosophy and social philosophy classes. Because I had no background in either of those two subjects, the notetaking style I developed was very involved, and basically amounted to full argument reconstruction and summarizing every point that an author would make. This served me well, because I had to engage in a LOT of in-class discussion, not to mention writing papers later: writing down page numbers for quotes and arguments saved me a ton of time on the back end.

But this old system of notetaking isn’t really working for me anymore. I graduated last year; now I just read for fun, and occasionally to write book reviews, but my current system is just so slow and actively disincentivizes me from reading books—which is the opposite of what I want!

So I asked you guys for help, and wow did you guys answer my call.

In order to parse your 16 (!!) replies, I’ve sorted them into three major categories:

1. Note minimalism.

2. Two passes.

3. Note maximalism.

And spoilers: there’s also a secret 4th category at the end.

Note minimalism

The common thread here is a phrase I’m cribbing from derek bayer: “minimum viable notetaking.”

Highlighting

Virginia Weaver

I just highlight and then look back at the highlights later to write notes, and/or jot down page numbers. Letting it mentally steep first is useful for me. When I recently was planning to argue against a book at extreme length I ended up basically making a personal index this way of relevant topics. If you have something like Zotero I’ve heard those are useful, but unfortunately I’ve been too lazy to learn them and mostly use Word docs or paper.

Hume Hobbyist

get a kindle and highlight. When you’re done with the book, export the notes. That’s what I do, at least.

Derek Beyer

It’s a battle, for sure. I read on my Kobo and have my highlights set to sync to my notes, which is about as good as it gets. When reading on paper, I’ve taken to just drawing a line along the side of a good passage, or even just dog-earring the page so I can see if I want to capture it later. A lot of stuff isn’t worth bothering with the capture and I think writing your own reactions is probably the most important part. I think minimum viable notetaking is best, whatever that means for you.

Pete Griffiths

Underline

Sam T. Oates

I just sit down and do a brain dump when I finish reading, or take photos of important pages/passages if I want stuff to reference in writing later

Jordan Call

I’m pro book notes, but you also won’t reference them later

Now, I do like highlighting as a strategy. I think it works very well for some people. But, as you can probably guess, I don’t like it for myself. That’s for one main reason: my Mom.

See, I grew up with a near-infinite access to books. My parents were pretty reasonable about most toy or videogame requests: I had an allowance and also could ask for stuff on Christmas or my birthday. But when it came to books, I basically got them whenever I wanted them.

My Mom’s upbringing was different. Growing up in Indonesia, she could only buy a very limited number of books per month with her allowance. This caused her to treat books incredibly carefully: to this day, she doesn’t even dog-ear books. And she passed this attitude down to me. I don’t think I’ve ever written in a book before.

I do highlight books I read on the Books or Kindle apps. But sometimes I’m reading PDFs, other times I want to record my thoughts about something, and honestly I’m just not used to this method of notetaking. I think it’s great and you should maybe consider trying it: it’s just not for me.

(Also, regarding Virgnia’s comment on “mentally steeping”: I’ve found that chatting with people about a book is really helpful!)

True minimalism

aelle

Read through with what least steals your attention. If the subject matter demands note taking, you’ll come back to it later.

Jordan Meadows

In my experience notes certainly helps a little bit to retain, but the whole point of notes is to not have to retain it so it’s a bit of a paradox. However, I rarely go back to the notes and can’t really quantify my retention rates.

Derek

Use AI to summarize the book into notes, then use AI to reference them later. Don’t read the book or the notes.

[some confusion because I thought he was being serious]

I’m sorry, it’s a joke. There are a lot of AI maximalists who regard things like reading and writing and the human production of culture as pointless impediments to efficiency, and I was trying to express that mindset.

See Poe’s law, I guess. Derek certainly fooled me.

Anyway,

Note minimalism greatly appeals to me. I grew up reading books this way: I would store all the facts in my head, and when I forgot them, I would simply reread the book. This is the simplest approach so far.

The issue is, minimalism clashes a bit with the book review-writing process. Writing book reviews means going back through the book to find the most salient or important parts. This often means copying quotes into your review, which means finding those quotes. And human memories are notoriously leaky: having a basic guide to the book really helps with representing the author’s arguments fairly and not just making things up.

Furthermore, see my response to Aelle:

I think what happens to me a lot of the time is that I vow to take very minimalist notes, do so for a while, find something that deserves a longer note, and then accidentally switch into taking long notes mode until I realize what has happened

Obviously this is a skill issue on my part, but it’s a real problem that I have. It’s hard to switch out of long notes mode once I enter it!

Still, I think I would like to try minimalist notetaking more often. Not all books warrant the full notetaking experience: not all books deserve it.¹ And that leads us to the next method: two passes.

Two passes

Read twice, notes once

James

I always think “what I need to do is just read it straight through once to get the high level without interruption, and then read it again but take notes”. But of course that second part never happens (for most books).

Moonsweater

What’s worked best for me is taking super vague + fast notes on the first pass, then condensing those into readable prose every chapter (or whatever) of the text. Best of all worlds!

Third Thoughts

read twice, notes once?

What I find most appealing—and most repulsive—about this method is James’ concern. The first read allows us to do two things:

1. Get a basic outline of the book.

2. Decide whether it’s worth rereading.

This is a really nice idea, particularly if you have a billion books on your to-read list (like me). Reading the book before taking any notes, or even just skimming the book to see if it’s worth reading, is seemingly the perfect solution to the Exploration–exploitation dilemma.

However, the issue is just as James says: what if you never do the second part? Or worse, what if you never do the first?

Unfortunately for me, my skill issue from before returns in force when I try to apply this method:

Funnily enough the first part basically never happens for me, because I find something I want to write down and then once I start notetaking I can’t stop for some reason

James responded:

This is probably a genuine personality difference! I start taking notes and then I either never finish the book because it’s taking me too long to get through it, or I get really into the book and get frustrated with how long it is taking me to take notes so I stop and just read it.

I still think this method is worth trying, but in order to execute on it you kinda have to double your reading time per book, so YMMV.

Read twice

Sam Waters

If the book notes slow you down this much, I wonder if it might just be better to read the book twice and not make notes while reading.

This is another “great” solution to our problem. After all, if a book is really worth rereading, you’ll remember to reread it, right?

Note maximalism

Summarize and respond

Liz Burton

Have you tried framing the book notes in your own words and including your thoughts on the information in the process. “On page X, author says [quote material], and I agree with X but Y strikes me as unsupported”—something like that?

In other words, if your retention is being disrupted by your own thoughts, make the notes holistic by including those as well, as you’ll need to include the original material to form logical arguments. I use green ink for original material and red for mine.

The point is to acquire the relevant material, which in a text is often surrounded by a lot of unnecessary bloviation. And the method I’m using helps to dig the important stuff out of that as well.

[Liz and I had an exchange about how and why I don’t like writing notes by hand]

You should contact Elon Musk, then, and volunteer for his brain chip experiments. That way, you won’t have to work at learning.

Ouch.

Sam Waters

Another idea: After each chapter, write like a paragraph or two summarizing what you just read, without looking back at the book.

Matt Ray

Here’s how I try to keep research from turning into a sinkhole. Might work for you too.

During the reading, let yourself take in and respond to the argument. Instead of writing a summary, just argue with the book. That will embed the book in questions and feelings important to you.

After reading a large chunk, try to formulate the point in your own words. Ideally you end with a plainer, simpler statement of the key point that can be easily shared and scaled up to more demanding forms. I think of this as “my boring version of Kant” etc. it’s their point but liberated from their idiolect and focused on the aspects I’ll want to recall. I build this up by taking a walk and explaining it in my head as if to a friend.

Save the note cards for specific quotes you want to be able to rescue from memory. You will never need a page by page summary, but it can be helpful to have key sentences with page number. When you go back to write, don’t thumb through the book or copious notes; recite your boring version and refresh yourself with the note cards. Sometimes I will pluck the quotes I need, stack them, and draw them as I need them.

This method has been my default for a few years now, and I don’t super love it—particularly when reading sparser books (for which one of the more minimalistic approaches is probably better). I never finished reading Abundance, because I insisted on taking notes on the book but had already read the vast majority of the content (truly like 50% of that book is recycled Klein and Thompson articles): I would’ve been better off skimming that book.

But this method is absolutely warranted for dense texts. I’m super glad that I took detailed summary and reaction notes while reading Psychopolitics and anticipate that my notes will be incredibly helpful for writing a book review later down the line.²

Whatever the hell this is

Virginia Weaver

Tangent: I had a phil professor who had learned in law school to underline half the book, then highlight half that, then half that, for studying, and while that doesn’t really have to do with notes, it stuck out in my head as wild. He gave me one of his old books, a copy of Habermas, and indeed that is how many highlights were in it.

This is crazy. I’m mostly including this because I have never done this and will hopefully never have to.

Okay, so we’ve covered minimalism, the two pass approach, and maximalism. There’s only one answer left now, and in my “humble” opinion, it’s the best answer.

You ready?

Here goes:

---

The best answer

Sean Waters

Do what you most enjoy. Saving time is a con.

And like, yeah.

1. Preliminary update from after I wrote this piece: not taking notes is really fun and I can’t believe I haven’t been doing this the whole time. I definitely retain less, but some books are truly more about vibes anyways—and even so, many of the major facts or lessons seem to have wormed their way into my subconscious anyway; I may not be able to recall them at will, but I genuinely do think that they’re changing the way I think about things.

2. (that being said, this can also go wrong: see my book review of the Evolution of Cooperation, which is long and meandering in large part because I loved all of the notes and arguments and couldn’t bear to kill some of my darlings. I’ll write a revised version one day…)