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Business News/ News / Business Of Life/  How to take notes from books
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How to take notes from books

A handful of the different ways in which you can take notes and record all the interesting things you read

Not every book must be consumed with a pen in one hand.Premium
Not every book must be consumed with a pen in one hand.

NEW DELHI :

Many things bother me about the world.

The fact that all the good food is generally bad for you. And, of course, vice versa. Or the fact that Dire Straits will probably never come together for one final reunion world tour. Then there is the fact that interplanetary-manned space travel looks highly unlikely in my lifetime.

But most of all there is the fact that there are so many great books in the world. And I am never going to get the free time or the lifespan to read them all. I kid you not. Book stores are full of so many wonderful, interesting, different, absorbing, funny, moving, enlightening, surprising, disturbing, life-changing, mood-lifting, spine-tingling, ancient-smelling books. And so little time.

And yet even when we do buy and read all the books we want to, we are faced with another problem: How do we record and recall all these amazing things we’re reading? In this edition of The Untangler I am going to share with you a handful of the different ways in which I take notes and record all the interesting things I read.

Mind you, none of these are original ideas in themselves. Some of them are basic and commonsensical. And others are derivatives of things I’ve gleaned from professors, teachers, authors and researchers.

Before you even pick a method of taking notes while reading a book, you need to ask yourself one important question: Do I really need to take notes? Because often the process of taking notes is a little like walking around the Louvre, Paris, on your first trip there with a DSLR camera. You may well record many wonderful things, but that is not the sole or even primary point of your trip. The idea is to experience the place.

The same holds true for books. Not every book you read must be consumed with a pen or pencil in one hand. Some are best read and enjoyed fully, before you revisit them for note-taking purposes. So do keep that in mind.

So you’ve decided to take notes. Now what?

If you do a lot of your reading on a Kindle or some other e-book device, then noting and marking is not a difficult thing to do. The challenge here is to be able to access these highlights easily.

The best way to do this on a Kindle is to use Kindle.amazon.com. Login to the site with your Amazon username and password and you can access all the highlights and notes you’ve made on your Kindle device or app. But the website is quite basic and you never know when Amazon may terminate this service. So you need to export these notes to a more reliable service. The best way to do this is to use the Bookcision button (www.norbauer.com/bookcision). Install the button in any browser, and then follow the easy steps to get a full copy of all the marks you’ve made in a Kindle book. Then save this copy on Evernote, Google Drive or just mail it to yourself in Gmail. You instantly get a fully searchable list of all your bookmarks. I use this all the time.

If you read non-ebooks, then there are a few ways of taking notes that are more useful than simply underlining bits, or dog-earing pages. One way is to stick a Post-it note on the inside cover of a book. On this note jot down the page number and theme of your marking. For instance “69: Nehru disses Patel". Then on page 69, simply underline the bit. This way, a month after reading the book when you’re trying to win a Twitter argument, you don’t have to spend hours finding the underlined bit in a book full of markings.

Another method I use a lot when researching something, is to create a mind map, something like a decision tree, for each book and then create branches for themes. Then I populate these themes with page numbers and excerpts. We’ll look at mind maps in a future Untangler. But you can Google it up.

I’ve left my favourite method for last. I picked this up from a teacher in school years ago. Each time he started a book, he’d quickly slip it into a temporary cover/jacket folded from a sheet of “foolscap" paper. Basically any copier or printer paper. As he read this book, he would jot down notes and page numbers on this jacket. Afterwards he’d remove this sheet, flatten it out, and file it away. Leaving behind a clean, mark-free book. Genius.

The next column will be on all these new fangled email clients with “snooze" functions. Are they really worthwhile?

To read previous columns, click here

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Published: 15 Jun 2015, 06:55 PM IST
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