my new year's resolution: book notes
As the years pass, I find myself more and more looking back fondly at books I've read, only to realize that I barely remember what they're about—much less about the prose, characters, plotting, or settings that made me love them in the first place. Instead, they hang in my memory like murky impressionist paintings—I remember the general premise, how they made me feel, but not much else.
To combat this, I headed to Notion, a note-taking platform (kind of like Evernote, but with more features) and picked up a book notes template from Ali Abdaal, a Youtuber. In my own database, I keep everything from what I call "Baby Notes"—quick summaries and thoughts -- to drafts of reviews I hope to publish, to extensive notes of all I learned from the book. I also tag everything with genres and subjects.
Ali's template also includes great page templates for fiction and nonfiction, but for the bulk of my notes—what I call "Lightning Reviews"—I only need four things: What the book was about (synopsis, maybe key characters and plot points), what I liked about it, what I didn't like, and what the book made me think about. The like and dislike sections are usually about craft—the author's form, style, characterization, development, plotting. And the final bit is about what themes were in the book, how it changed the way I think about something, how I relate it to something that's been on my mind lately, like tech and culture or sustainability.
The only resolution I've made for 2021 is to do these reading notes for every book I read, and hopefully I continue doing it for the rest of my life. Even if I no longer keep my thoughts in Notion, or in such a rigid and organized format, I want to keep taking notes, and to keep it all in a database that's easily searchable and accessible.
I'm doing this for several reasons. One is to keep these books in my memory. Another is to collect my thoughts on craft and style for use in my own work, as I always write more and better when I'm engaging with books more analytically.
And finally, I'm doing it because I feel like my thoughts are only half-formed until I write them down. When I read and finish a book, my head is full of incoherent bits of opinion, wonder, criticism, new knowledge, and new perspectives. By writing them down, I give these thoughts a body. They're now more easy to remember, to reflect on; but also to develop and evolve.
Even though writing these book notes is time consuming—even consuming time I could use to reading more books!—it's well worth it.
Do you keep tracks of books you read? How do you keep your notes?