Remembering what you read

One of the chief uses of note-making is to help you to remember what you read. But it’s not as simple as imagining your notes are just an ‘aide memoire’. When you make notes you forget your reading and replace it with the future opportunity to read again not the original book but your own notes on it. So making notes is inevitably a process of interpretation, which involves the occlusion of the original work, albeit in the name of preserving it. Psychologists, including Ciara Greene and Gillian Murphy, authors of Memory Lane: The perfectly imperfect ways we remember (Princeton UP, 2025) believe “we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them”. So when we re-read our notes, does that mean we’re reconstructing our memories of the book, or just the memories of our notes? These elements in time are all intertwined: the content of the book itself, the environment in which we read it in the first place, the environment of the place where the notes were made,…