Taking notes about books

One of the most common type of notes I have, after my journal notes, are notes about books I've read.

I'm an avid reader, since a few years ago, with more than 100 books read every year. With that, I had to learn how to take notes about what I read, or I wouldn't remember anything in the end. I must confess that I didn't have a process for that before and I have read about two or three hundred books — after my graduation — where I didn't take any note.

Anyway… Here's my actual process.

Reading

Most of my reading has been digital in many years. I prefer investing in that book format as it is easier to read, carry many books around, and take information out of the books.

As such, I quickly skim through the book, to have some idea of it. Then I start reading (if there's any progress tracking, I reset the book as “not read”, since the browsing process will mess with reading progress).

Process Skeleton

There are usually two notes per book.

1. The first note is automatically generated from the highlights. When it isn't automatically generated, I create the note in the standard format as if it was being generated by my automation.
2. The second note is where I write my thoughts, questions, learnings.

Note 2 links to note 1 as its parent.

Note 1 is what I like calling a “pristine” (or pure) note. This in the sense that there's no opinion or comment of mine in there. It is all data from the book I'm reading. To some people it is hard doing that, so my suggestion is having another tab or a notebook close by to express your opinions, as note 2 explained below. Once you're able to — finished reading that day, finished the book, etc. — you then convert everything to digital (if required) and connect things.

Note 2 is where I write my thoughts, where I link things and where I process the information learned in that book. It is, then, an opinionated note. It links to the pristine note as its parent, and it is from where I link my derived notes (they become its children notes, friends, opposing notes, etc.). In case something deserves the attention, it gets promoted to a note. Otherwise, small thoughts are kept together in this note.

Creating each note

Notes from the books, the type 1, may be obtained automatically from my Kindle, in case I read the book there. In case I didn't, I export the highlights, and then I use a book template to format these notes. In Obsidian, this template creates callouts with custom CSS based on the colors of the highlighting pen I use (note that in physical Kindle devices that don't support colors all highlights show up as yellow, at the Kindle app one can choose from some other colors — I use that to differentiate from where I was reading: everything from Kindle is yellow and everything from mobile devices is blue; I don't use the Kindle app at the desktop).

I don't touch this note anymore in regard to its contents. If I need to change something, my preference is running it again through the automated process that generated the note, so that its information is maintained without human intervention.

My comments and annotations note is manually created. Its template is the Template - Generic in the sense that it has no special formatting and starts with standard metadata and a header.

In the rare cases where I don't have any highlights from the book to create the automated note, but I have comments and annotations, I highlight the book title to have the note autogenerated. This serves two purposes: updating all places that track automated information from the highlights (especially for the dates when the information was highlighted) as well as automatically pulling all the information from the Internet without me having to run one extra command (read: out of laziness for the second part).

Processing each type of books

The process of annotation varies based on the category of the book. The main categories are below. Anything else will be fit into these categories as they cover the combinations of having notes. The fourth possibility was no note at all (which is very frequent, since not every book or article generates some insights or has information meaningful enough to be added to my PKM).

Amusement books

These are the ones I read to pass time. I read everything: magazines, advertisements, all kinds of books. Science fiction, drama, detective and other types of books fall into this category.

Usually, for these books, I don't take any notes. Sometimes, if I like a phrase, example, or saying, I might highlight that and that is all. It is rare that one of these makes me think and take notes. So, for these, I'll at most have the highlights note and nothing else.

Philosophy, Parenthood, Self help

These start becoming more important and might have some takeaways. There are sections and things I highlight, so they end up always having the highlights notes.

The automated and manual workflows listed above apply here. It is not always that I have comments and annotations. Typically, for the books on parenthood I have something linking things to possible situations and examples where things apply to my kids. For the books on philosophy, I often use that note as a hub on something I improve in myself or to something that I start doing because of it.

Technical and Management books

Here I have some practical activities and learnings where I apply them on my day-to-day life, including work (even though I don't use Obsidian for work learnings, and training notes, end up here since they become “a part of me”, part of my brain).

For these I usually have both types of notes: the highlights and annotations / comments.

These notes are then regarded as “parents” or “friends” of the other notes derived from that.

Plugins

To process these types of notes, I have two plugins dedicated to them:

1. Kindle Highlights Plugin
2. Book Search Plugin

The first is responsible for most of my notes, while the second I use for the books I didn't read on my Kindle. Both are set to generate more or less the same information in the same format.

There are other plugins that help with books that doesn't sync to the Amazon Kindle cloud. They are useful, for example, to process the exported HTML from sideloaded books and books that came from sources other than the Kindle store.

Using the data — Visualization

Just out of curiosity, I sort my books based on the number of highlights on each one first and descending updated date order second. This assumes that the book with more highlights is more useful or influenced me more than the book with fewer highlights. This might be true or not, but it is a criterion and seemed far when I defined it.

I, then, use these notes to generate a set a cards view for my library (see DV_Livros). I rarely check it, but it is a nice visual when I am bragging about my reading habit.