Guide · Best books · 3 min read
The best books on reading better and remembering it
These five books cover what it takes to get more out of reading: how deeply to read a given book, how to take notes that help you think, and what learning research says about making ideas last. Start with How to Read a Book for the method, then How to Take Smart Notes for what to do with what you read.
1.How to Read a Book — Mortimer J. Adler & Charles Van Doren
The classic manual on reading for understanding, first published in 1940 and revised in 1972. Its most useful idea is that there are levels of reading, from a quick inspection of a book to slow analytical reading and reading several books on one question against each other, and that each book deserves a deliberate choice of level.
The analytical sections are demanding, and the book was written with long, argued works in mind. Read the parts on inspectional and analytical reading first; they change how you approach every book afterwards.
2.How to Take Smart Notes — Sönke Ahrens
A short, practical book on turning reading into writing and thinking, based on the slip-box method of the sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Ahrens separates quick notes, notes on what you read written in your own words, and permanent notes that each hold one linked idea.
The full system takes discipline to keep, and the evidence for it is mostly the experience of its users. Even if you adopt only the habit of writing every note in your own words and linking it to another, the book pays for itself.
3.Make It Stick — Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III & Mark A. McDaniel
The clearest book on what learning research says about memory, written by a writer with two cognitive scientists. Its central finding is uncomfortable: rereading and highlighting feel effective and do little, while retrieving what you learned, with effort, makes it last.
For readers, the practical message is to close the book and recall after each chapter, and to distrust the feeling of fluency that comes from familiar pages.
4.How We Learn — Benedict Carey
A science journalist's tour of the research on learning, written as a story rather than a manual. Its most useful chapters for readers are on spacing, why returning to material over several days beats one long session, and on how forgetting can help memory.
Read it when you want to understand why the techniques in Make It Stick work. It is lighter on method and stronger on the reasons.
5.Ultralearning — Scott H. Young
Scott Young's account of intense, self-directed learning projects, with principles drawn from his own experiments and from research. For readers the key principle is directness: learning sticks best when it happens close to the situation where it will be used.
The book's projects are more extreme than most readers need, but the principles scale down. Read a book with a real use in mind, and apply one idea within the week.
The honest ending
Read Adler for how deeply to read, Ahrens for what to write while you read, Make It Stick and How We Learn for why recall and spacing make it last, and Ultralearning for tying reading to real use. None of them asks you to read faster; all of them ask you to read more actively. The Read More and Remember It road turns their most useful ideas into twelve daily Stations, each ending with something to do before tomorrow.
Questions people ask
- Which book should I read first?
- How to Read a Book, at least its sections on inspectional and analytical reading. It changes how you approach every other book, including the rest of this list.
- Are these books about speed reading?
- No. None of them promises faster reading. They are about reading at the right depth and keeping what you read, which usually means spending a little more effort on fewer books.