I talked about Fleeting Notes earlier.

Next step is Literature Notes.

This is like a book report but not exactly.

Literature notes are brief paragraphs on the ideas that caught my attention as I read a non-fiction book. I’ve already captured these ideas in Fleeting Notes. Now is the time to understand them.

I open up the notepad with fleeting notes, and the book, and start writing literature notes. The key here is I must write in my own words.

Sometimes I supplement my literature notes with a scan of the text from the book showing it in quotations. This is an easy reference for complex ideas. I can always grab the book from the shelf. I use the scan text feature on my iPhone.

The idea here is for me to revisit all relevant ideas from the book in one place and in my own words. This is understanding. Learning comes from understanding, not the other way around.

I grant it, this is more work on top of reading. Cal Newport is right — he claims on his podcast that this method requires a lot of time. To me, writing literature notes on a non-fiction book feels like completion. If I just read a book and put it on the shelf, I feel that I am leaving something incomplete in the process of reading.

Literature Notes is neither about speed or efficiency. I am probably not going to turn these notes into academic papers or published books like Niklas Luhmann did and many others do. Literature Notes to me is about depth. It is putting down roots into ideas and cultivating them.

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens

If I am going to devote a lot of time reading a book, I want to remember what caught my attention. This is my way to honoring the attention I give, by capturing ideas in the book that provide an attachment-point for my attention.

Attention comes from the latin word Tenere which means to stretch and make tense (via Matt Crawford The World Beyond Your Head).

So I take notes as I read.

I read with a notepad and pencil by my side
I mark the books with a pencil — underline or double vertical lines in the margin
This is key — I don’t mark sections that don’t interest me and only mark those ideas make my eyes go wide. My job is not to write a book summary, but to distill those ideas that provide a robust-enough attachment point.
I note the page number on a note pad and the name of the idea, just a few words
Sometimes I will quickly jot down a connecting thought or story that surfaced so I can explore it later

Once I finish reading, I will use the Fleeting Notes as a prompt to write Literature Notes, more on this another day.

I find this incredibly helpful when I pick up the book after a few days break — a quick refresher of the ideas that caught my eye.

Writing by hand is found to increase retention in a study by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer in 2014.

How do you read non-fiction?

More on this topic in book, How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens