🏷️ Tag: intellectual life

Sometimes it concerns me how little I retain of the majority of books I read.

Since summer 2017, I've maintained a complete list of every book started and completed, and considering how much time has passed since then, there actually aren't very many of them to name: only 141. Of those, only about twenty of them left behind a well-cemented memory of the plot, and for the rest, only vague impressions remain at best, of sundry characters, settings, writing styles, and my own emotional reaction to the book. For the record, one of the most memorable was Blindness by José Saramago. Some books I barely recall beyond the title. Is this some type of clinical amnesia? The reason it worries me is that while reading, I am fully conscious, with almost no exception. In other words, comprehension while reading isn't the problem, but retention instead. These fugues seem strictly literary in contact, because my memories of social interactions, places visited, and decisions made during the time I read some of these "lost books" are crystal clear, or at least plastic-bottle clear.

Apparently, my brain consumes books like my body consumes food: It serves its purpose in the moment, providing mental nutritition, but then somehow my brain manages to excrete 90% of its intake through some rhetorical rectum. It would be much more satisfying to benefit from both full comprehension and recall, but how to get there isn't clear right now.