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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

So I just went and searched for The Lean Startup, which I'm currently reading, and there's a huge amount of notes. So my question for this audience: do you read books this way where you take huge amounts of notes? I often lament not taking notes while reading a book, but at the same time, I'm certain that if I tried to take good notes, certainly at the level of detail I see here, I just wouldn't read many books at all. I have young children and it already feels like a huge time commitment to me to read any particular thing, which often sends me into an analysis paralysis loop trying to figure out what book to read next that is worth that commitment. I mostly just try accept that I just won't be able to read as much as I'd like for a bunch of years, and certainly not with good notes.

But I'm curious how other people square this circle.

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> So my question for this audience: do you read books this way where you take huge amounts of notes? I often lament not taking notes while reading a book, but at the same time, I'm certain that if I tried to take good notes, certainly at the level of detail I see here, I just wouldn't read many books at all.

I didn't used to keep notes. Then about 6-7 years ago, I decided I would (for nonfiction books that seem to contain lessons).

Why?

Because I realized I retained very little of the book a year down the road. So I asked myself why I was reading these books if I'm not absorbing the lessons contained therein. Without retaining that knowledge, the reality was that the only benefit they provided me was entertainment. And nonfiction pales in comparison to fiction for entertainment value (at least for books like Sapiens, etc).

So I decided that either I should stop reading them and simply read more fiction instead, or I continue reading nonfiction and take decent notes I can refer to later.

I picked the latter.

And yes, it has the downsides you mentioned: I cannot even read a fifth of the books I used to as taking notes is time consuming (and my notes are still a lot rawer than his). I don't think I mentally retain that much more than I used to, and I still wonder whether I should just stick to fiction. But going back to reading nonfiction without taking notes seems like the worst of both worlds - you get inferior entertainment, and you don't really learn much.

I do take a lot of notes. I wouldn't characterize it as huge, but one of the perks of reading e-books is that you can highlight without damaging the book itself. I take anywhere from 15 to 80 notes per book, and then transfer them to a word document for further research. Ninety percent of my notes are about things I want to research further, rather than quotes.

The one exception where I literally took like hundred of notes was from the book "This is how they tell me the world ends" which has a 50 page word file that you can download from the author's site that contains all the bibliography and online resources she used to write the book. I've gone through each and every one of the references. There are thousands of them in there.

I don't take notes because I read primarily for entertainment, in both fiction and non-fiction -- I have no need to recall in detail the contents of a book or to tie them into some overarching system, because I'm not an author or academic or even somebody who writes blog posts, and very little of what I read is related to my work. If I really need to I can always go back and dip into a book again if I want to look something up.

i underline/mark with graphite pencil (12b) on the book itself. can quickly go thru the interesting passages anytime. erase the marks when u want.

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