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Most people treat books like delicate objects. They keep them clean, pristine, and absolutely unmarked. A creased spine feels like a wound. A note in the margin? Unthinkable. But in 1940, a man named Mortimer Adler said this attitude was nonsense. His short essay entitled How to Mark a Book argued that writing in your books isn’t defacement — it’s a sign of life. The only way to really understand a book is to engage with it, argue with it, and respond to it. Today, science backs him up. Studies in educational psychology show that annotating a text dramatically improves your retention of its contents. In some cases, readers who engage actively with what they read by marking a book remember up to seven times more than those who don’t. So why don’t more people do it? Part of the reason is because it goes against how most of us were raised to treat books. We’re taught to keep them neat, as if the highest good of a book is to survive untouched. But Adler flips this notion on its head by say

How to Remember Everything You Read Tips from an American philosopher The Culturist Apr 09, 2025 37,994 594 6,527 Share Most people treat books like delicate objects. They keep them clean, pristine, and absolutely unmarked. A creased spine feels like a wound. A note in the margin? Unthinkable. But in 1940, a man named Mortimer Adler said this attitude was nonsense. His short essay entitled How to Mark a Book argued that writing in your books isn’t defacement — it’s a sign of life. The only way to really understand a book is to engage with it, argue with it, and respond to it. Today, science ba

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