Reading Retention: Forget the book; remember the experience

Posted by David Duhr in ABCs of Writing      13 comments

Feb
17

You know that feeling when you get to the end of a paragraph or page of whatever you’re reading and you realize you have no idea what you’ve just read?

I have that problem all the time… with entire books. Because my reading retention is atrocious.

I’m currently reading a book about Shakespeare, and over the weekend, while thinking about my terrible retention skills (and totally ignoring the words as I continued reading them), I suddenly felt a sort of defeatism that almost made me drop the book and walk away.

If I’m not going to remember any of these facts and anecdotes, I thought, what’s the point of reading this book? Or any book?

I’ve spent the week thinking about this. Here’s where I landed.

My Blue Hell

I Googled “reading retention” and got a bunch of educational links containing strategies, some obvious (take notes), others unique (the moment you read something you want to remember, paraphrase it aloud to someone else).

But I also got a piece from Ian Crouch at the New Yorker called “The Curse of Reading and Forgetting.”

He begins with a situation in which I’ve often found myself: A friend recommends a book, Crouch begins reading it, and early on he realizes that not only has he read it before, but that he’s read it within the past couple of years!

“Looking at my bookshelves,” Crouch writes, “the assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and discarded, given away, or returned to libraries, represent a vast catalogue of forgetting.”

Not only is there all of this forgetting, but think also of all of the pointless remembering: I can give you a blow-by-blow account of the plot of My Blue Heaven; I can describe for you every moment of the Keyboard Cat videos; I can recite to you the lyrics of “Achy Breaky Heart” and “We Built This City.”

It’s so depressing.

“The Warm Sunlight in the Coffee Shop”

But then Crouch drops a wonderful passage that made me feel instantly better: “If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a particular place,” he writes. “What I remember most about Malamud’s short-story collection The Magic Barrel is the warm sunlight in the coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before high school.

“That is missing the more important points, but it is something.”

This reminded me of a post I wrote back in 2016, “Books Become Bookmarks: The benefits of keeping a reading list,” where I talked about how writing down the titles and authors of the books I read, as well as where I read them, often helped me retain something of the experience, even if little or nothing from the book itself.

“Much of the joy of reading is found in the moment, the experience itself,” I wrote. “But there’s great pleasure to be had, as well, in the remembrance of that experience, in the ability to reflect on a book years later, and in rediscovering where, when — and this is crucial — who you were at the time.”

Then I shared a few moments along the lines of Crouch’s experience with The Magic Barrel. And I’ve had more of them since. Last fall I was in Boston visiting friends and at the Harvard Coop, which I hadn’t been to in years, I bought a copy of A.M. Homes The Safety of Objects. I remember almost nothing about that story collection now… but I do remember choosing it at the store — the smells and sounds, the comforting layout of this place so familiar to me — and starting it in this hole-in-the-wall pizza joint in Harvard Square — a Harvard tour group came in, fresh-faced babies with their futures immediately in front of them, and let me tell you, they were hungry — and then lounging around with it on various benches and stoops, and then finishing it in Winthrop Square while waiting for a buddy to get off work, watching so many people fresh out of the office trying to do some of their own reading in the last of the day’s sunlight.

And maybe that’s enough? If I had to choose between remembering that experience and remembering the plot details and/or specific passages or moments from the book, I would have to choose the former, the experience, almost every time.

Of course it helps when that experience is out of the ordinary. This Shakespeare book I’m halfway through, I’ve read part of it at home, part of it on the treadmill at my gym. I doubt I’ll remember anything about the experience, just like I doubt I’ll remember much about the book itself. And that’s the worst of both worlds.

But it’s better than not reading at all.

Your Turn

Ian Crouch writes that remembering the experience of reading a book “is missing the more important points.” Do you agree, or is it the experience that matters? Or does the answer lie somewhere in between? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What are your tactics for better reading retention?

Share with us a fond experience of reading a book — sights, smells, sounds, etc. — particularly if you remember little or nothing about the book itself.

WriteByNight co-founder David Duhr is copy editor and fiction editor at the Texas Observer and has written about books for the Dallas Morning News, Electric Literature, Publishing Perspectives, and others.

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