A SYSTEM FOR YOUR KINDLE TO BUILD “MEMORY TRIGGERS”
“I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
I wouldn’t be surprised if Nguyen’s opening line of his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel was held in the rafters of sensational opening sentences along with “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” among many others. But how often do we recall these enduring openers to reminiscence on the emotional memory of the time when we read through the author’s story (in case of fiction), or the indelible anecdote that solidifies a learning point (in case of nonfiction)?
These opportunities to go through what I’ll call a “memory trigger”, specifically from books or articles, is an opportunity many of us probably do not take advantage of. And I would argue that these opportunities become less frequent unless we engineer a system to pull the trigger.
I wasn’t randomly going through The Sympathizer for my second read when I thought about the opening line. I haven’t opened the book for over a year. Instead I utilize a system that involves a couple of tools in coordination with my Kindle: Readwise and Instapaper.
If you’re already an avid Kindle user, you most likely already highlight text within the books/articles you read on Kindle that you want to save. However, if you’re like me, you probably do not review the mass of notes you’ve saved from all the texts you’ve read.
Here’s where Readwise comes in. Readwise is an application that collects all of your Kindle highlights and stores them in a database. Everyday Readwise will email you and host on their website a collection of five random notes from your highlights that you can choose to save or discard.
This is what it looks like on my end:
Still, isolating our database to only include highlights from our Kindle is doing our knowledge consumption a disservice. I agree with Eugene Wei, in his conversation with Khe Hy, that reading is actually a fairly inefficient way to learn, and rather is a social asset we use to feign intellect. Instead, most of our learning comes from observational learning and well… articles.
Articles are much more concise, but still disseminate the core lessons authors want to teach their audience. Articles eliminate the redundancy of anecdotes you see in books. So if you trust me this far, then you’ll probably want your database to include highlights from your articles.
Instapaper is a web-clipping tool you can use to save web pages to read later on your phone, desktop, or Kindle. Instapaper is the flowing river of articles to feed our Readwise. What I enjoy about Instapaper is, when re-reading an article on Instapaper you can highlight excerpts and those highlighted excerpts will automatically upload to your Readwise database.
I should include that this system is not perfect. There are diminishing returns as there is with anything in life. I read my Readwise highlights by creating a setting that allows Readwise to open whenever I open a new tab on Chrome. This process quickly exhausts its glamour and becomes as easy as ignoring a spam email.
A second criticism I have is more related to the action of “highlighting”. Part of the beauty of reading full books or even articles is being able to physically write notes in the margin as it stimulates an imagined conversation between you and the author. Going through high school, we weren’t asked to annotate books by swiping over portions of texts we enjoyed or resonated with, but rather were asked to critically deconstruct what was going on in our heads as we read a passage.
With Kindle and Instapaper highlights, we’re eliminating a key opportunity to question the author. So I guess what I’m trying to say is, Amazon, if you ever read this please let me draw on my kindle!
This essay was originally published in my weekly newsletter if you haven’t already subscribed check out dkjlee.substack.com.
