Phil Gyford

I’m a forgetful man. I could tell you the names of most people in my classes at school or college, but when it comes to the contents of books or plots of films I’m usually stumped. I’ve often wondered whether it’s worth plodding through several hundred pages of a non-fiction book when a couple of weeks later I might only remember a couple of ideas. I deeply, deeply envy people who can rattle off quotes and references as if Google is squatting behind their eyes.

So, in an effort to make something, anything, stick, I’ve started taking notes when I read non-fiction books. A few post-it notes nestled inside the cover are a convenient place to scribble thoughts and summaries. Later I type these up so I can still read them in the future, so I can search them, so I can back them up, and in the hope that the repetition will hammer a few more facts into place.

Given I have the notes in digital form I thought I might as well put them online; a couple of hours work in setting the weblog up means I can access my notes from anywhere and search them easily, making them a much more accessible form of external scaffolding (a term I picked up from Small Pieces Loosely Joined). There’s always a chance someone else will find them useful too. Having only done three books so far it’s hard to tell how things will settle down (assuming I keep this going), but I expect the notes will be a mixture of the points I found most interesting and attempts at a complete summary. We’ll see how it goes.

(Of course, there’s an RSS feed if you’re embarrassingly interested.)