Reading, Consciously

I read a lot of books. 

Probably too many, to be honest.

My short term memory isn't great and I burn through genre fiction, to the tune of a couple of books a week. At least the ones I finish, there are many I don't finish but the way I organize them you'd never know. I'm often dozens of pages into something before I realize I gave up on it three months ago just a chapter or two ahead. Or, even worse, remember that I finished it and have no idea how it ended or who any of these people are. 

Like I said, my memory ain't what it used to be.

This strikes me as a waste of what few brain cells I have left, so I've made an effort to pay more attention to me reading in the hope of maybe retaining something with an eye towards quality over quantity. 

Like any good nerd, I have a plan. And tools.

Obsidian for notes and Cailbre viewer. I like HD video, usually concerts, under it all.

I figure being upright and focused are prerequisites, so that rules out my handy Kindle in a cozy bed. That's fun fiction time instead of television and as much as I love Stephen King, Scalzi and Chuck Wendig these are not books I'm going to take notes on. I'll leave the sociological implications of The Stand to others.

My handwriting is atrocious, so a book and notepad may not be future proof. I can barely read my scribble now and context switching between holding a book and writing a note seems awkward.

Upright and focused, without context switching, pretty much leaves me with a laptop.

So, if I'm using a laptop aesthetics matter. I'm gonna rice it and make it easy on my eyes.

I've used Obsidian for a long time and love it. Obsidian's feature set is far too extensive to go into here, but it freakin' rocks and if you haven't used it, you should give it a go. Some claim it's life changing,

Obsidian. Amazing. Miraculous. Just use it.

I can write everything in markdown and opened next to an ebook reader (see above image) so it's easy to copy and paste between them. I can create external links and copy and paste relevant images. Tags link it all together and in the end I get an easily exported md file, complete with attachments, ready to be copy and pasted into this site.

I generally float my notes app and ebook viewer (I use the one baked into Calibre) at sensible sizes on top of full screen video. I like music when I work (I'm looking at this like work, I have to retrain my brain) and usually run some concert or ambient river rock stream nature thing on repeat forever. 

Without background music the normal noise of life distracts me. Music I can vibe to. Fire trucks and brawling neighbors, not so much. 

This is all picom and awesome wm stuff.  I'm sure it's possible in other environments, but I couldn't tell you how.

Hopefully, in the end, I wind up with a useful history of my reading with notes. Because they are in Obsidian they are linked together and those relations transfer effortlessly to Craft.