digest
Short Summary
Main recommendation: Build a personal reading encyclopedia with three parts (a timeline, a topical section, and an authors section) fed by annotating as you read, rather than relying on a commonplace book or note cards. Adam Walker, a literature PhD, presents this as a reference system for any humanities subject that helps you read and remember, not just read and forget.
Key Points
- Read without stopping, using a pencil for underlining, and only copy passages out after finishing the book, so you keep attention on the argument.
- Annotate three kinds of passages while reading: dates (box them and underline the event), interesting quotations, and interesting facts about authors.
- Keep a topical index on the blank back flap of each book, adapted from Ralph Waldo Emerson's reading habit, recording topic and page number.
- The timeline reveals overlaps between writers often treated as separate, such as Shakespeare and Milton, and Austen publishing during the height of Romanticism in 1813.
- Organize quotations by topic (e.g., "genius," "style") and by author, so you can see what other writers say about the same figure.
- Copying quotations out helps them stick, and at the end of the year he sometimes prints the file out in spiral-bound form as a refresher.
Details Worth Noting
- Concrete instructions:
- Read a book in one sitting as far as possible, pencil in hand, underlining only. Do not copy passages yet.
- While reading, box dates and underline the related event; underline interesting quotations; underline interesting facts about the author.
- On the blank back flap, write each topic of interest with its page number as you encounter it.
- After finishing the book, go back, flip through the underlined pages, and log each item into the appropriate part of your encyclopedia.
- To start the timeline, copy the timeline at the back of the Oxford histories of English literature as a skeleton, then add biographical and other dates from your reading into each century file (he began this in 2020, using one file per century).
- Organize the topical section alphabetically by subject or name, and the authors section chronologically by author, placing quotations about an author under that author's name rather than the commentator's (e.g., Johnson's comments on Addison go under Addison).
- Each new fact should connect to something already in your memory, placing a figure within a network of other literary writers, events, and political circumstances shaping their life and works.
- Walker keeps the attribution at the end of each quotation instead of abbreviations, though he says shorthand abbreviations also work.
- The timeline example shows Thomas Adams's 1629 folio of sermons and Adams's admiration by the Romantics, who knew him through Coleridge and Lamb.
- Walker notes the system is not sensational reading and is more useful as a reference to revisit memory paths.
Bottom Line
A personal, searchable encyclopedia built from annotations and dated, topic-based entries is a more durable reading system for humanities study than a commonplace book or note cards, because it makes connections across authors and periods visible.
