You Don’t Have to Remember Everything You Read
Books change you even if you don’t realize it
I’ve always said that, if I could pick a superpower, it would be remembering everything I read.
I think you can imagine my frustration. I invest a lot of my time in books (I read 80 books last year), and it might seem like a waste if I end up forgetting almost everything I read. When someone asks me what a certain book is about, I usually blank and have to review my notes and highlights to answer. To be honest, it used to be embarrassing for me.
But, after some time, I’ve finally made peace with forgetting.
Although reading to soon forget might seem like a waste of time, it’s not.
“Books don’t change people, paragraphs do — sometimes sentences.” — John Piper
Ralph Waldo Emerson — an essayist and philosopher — said once, “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.”
Understanding this — that the books I read make me, even if I forget them — has changed the way I approach reading. My brain might not store every bit of information, but that doesn’t mean my reading time isn’t valuable.
While I read, my eyes are being opened to other ideas and perspectives. Good authors make me stop and think. They make me laugh or get angry. I mark up important points, add personal notes, and record my response to the things the author is proposing. Reading is not passive. Even if I forget all of the content of the book, pondering an author’s ideas has changed me. And that’s the point.
Making peace with the fact that I will forget helps me not to see my reading time as a mere academic task. I don’t sit down just to get a bunch of information. Every book is a conversation with someone else; a conversation that I might forget, but that will leave its mark — big or small — in me.
Perhaps today I just remember those sentences Piper talks about. Or I might not even remember those sentences exactly. I don’t have a problem with that. Those words have changed deeply the way I see the world and the way I walk in it. That’s enough.
You may want to try different techniques to make the most of the things you read. That’s fantastic. Darius Foroux has an excellent guide that can help you.
But you can also read and feel free to forget. Even though your brain doesn’t remember the words, your mind will never be the same.
A version of this article was originally published in Spanish on Medium.
