Books are a great way to learn and grow as individuals, allowing anyone to comprehend a subject. Filled with facts and engaging content, they are a treasure-trove of knowledge that all of us can, to varying degrees, incorporate into our lives. Probably the greatest shame of my reading habits has been the number of highlights I have taken with Kindle over the past decade.
Highlighting is a low-effort way to engage with the content we encounter. When we read something of interest to us, we take a second or two to highlight its intrinsic importance. But what do we do from there? Since I have started to read with my Kindle, I have accumulated thousands of highlights which I truthfully have never reviewed in my life. In the past few years, I have read some quite enlightening books and found myself unable to recall the vast majority of the information in the pages, let alone my highlights.
A lot of the system I plan on using to complete this comes from Ali Abdaal, a physician and Youtuber known for his devotion to diligent notetaking. In a recent video, he describes using Readwise to pull all of the highlights he has taken in his Kindle and exports it to his Notion for further review. In the coming weeks, I plan to use these two apps to distill information from books into condensed notes to share here.
If you decide to follow me in this journey, you should plan on seeing at least one book note review a month. I tend to read non-fiction political science books - generally biographies of 'great men', or books on contemporary political science.