Why We Forget Most of the

Books We Read
... and the movies and TV shows we watch

Julie Beck

Jan 26, 2018

Pamela Paul’s memories of reading are less about words

and more about the experience. “I almost always remember
where I was and I remember the book itself. I remember the
physical object,” says Paul, the editor of The New York Times
Book Review, who reads, it is fair to say, a lot of books. “I
remember the edition; I remember the cover; I usually
remember where I bought it, or who gave it to me. What I don’t
remember—and it’s terrible—is everything else.”
For example, Paul told me she recently finished reading
Walter Isaacson’s biography of Benjamin Franklin. “While I read
that book, I knew not everything there was to know about Ben
Franklin, but much of it, and I knew the general timeline of the
American revolution,” she says. “Right now, two days later, I
probably could not give you the timeline of the American
revolution.”
Surely some people can read a book or watch a movie once
and retain the plot perfectly. But for many, the experience of
consuming culture is like filling up a bathtub, soaking in it, and
then watching the water run down the drain. It might leave a
film in the tub, but the rest is gone.
“Memory generally has a very intrinsic limitation,” says
Faria Sana, an assistant professor of psychology at Athabasca
University, in Canada. “It’s essentially a bottleneck.”
 The “forgetting curve,” as it’s called, is steepest during the
first 24 hours after you learn something. Exactly how much you
forget, percentage-wise, varies, but unless you review the
material, much of it slips down the drain after the first day, with
more to follow in the days after, leaving you with a fraction of
what you took in.
Presumably, memory has always been like this. But Jared
Horvath, a research fellow at the University of Melbourne, says
that the way people now consume information and
entertainment has changed what type of memory we value—and
it’s not the kind that helps you hold onto the plot of a movie you
saw six months ago.
In the internet age, recall memory—the ability to
spontaneously call information up in your mind—has become less
necessary. It’s still good for bar trivia, or remembering your to-
do list, but largely, Horvath says, what’s called recognition
memory is more important. “So long as you know where that
information is at and how to access it, then you don’t really need
to recall it,” he says.
Research has shown that the internet functions as a sort of
externalized memory. “When people expect to have future
access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the
information itself,” as one study puts it. But even before the
internet existed, entertainment products have served as
externalized memories for themselves. You don’t need to
remember a quote from a book if you can just look it up. Once
videotapes came along, you could review a movie or TV show
fairly easily. There’s not a sense that if you don’t burn a piece of
culture into your brain, that it will be lost forever.
With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the
internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we
consume even further. But it’s hardly as if we remembered it all
before.
Plato was a famous early curmudgeon when it came to the
dangers of externalizing memory. In the dialogue Plato wrote
between Socrates and the aristocrat Phaedrus, Socrates tells a
story about the god Theuth discovering “the use of letters.” The
Egyptian king Thamus says to Theuth:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’
souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the
external written characters and not remember of themselves.

(Of course, Plato’s ideas are only accessible to us today

because he wrote them down.)
“[In the dialogue] Socrates hates writing because he thinks
it’s going to kill memory,” Horvath says. “And he’s right. Writing
absolutely killed memory. But think of all the incredible things
we got because of writing. I wouldn’t trade writing for a better
recall memory, ever.” Perhaps the internet offers a similar
tradeoff: You can access and consume as much information and
entertainment as you want, but you won’t retain most of it.
It’s true that people often shove more into their brains than
they can possibly hold. Last year, Horvath and his colleagues at
the University of Melbourne found that those who binge-watched
TV shows forgot the content of them much more quickly than
people who watched one episode a week. Right after finishing
the show, the binge-watchers scored the highest on a quiz about
it, but after 140 days, they scored lower than the weekly viewers.
They also reported enjoying the show less than did people who
watched it once a day, or weekly.
People are binging on the written word, too. In 2009, the
average American encountered 100,000 words a day, even if
they didn’t “read” all of them. It’s hard to imagine that’s
decreased in the nine years since. In “Binge-Reading Disorder,”
an article for The Morning News, Nikkitha Bakshani analyzes the
meaning of this statistic. “Reading is a nuanced word,” she
writes, “but the most common kind of reading is likely reading
as consumption: where we read, especially on the internet,
merely to acquire information. Information that stands no chance
of becoming knowledge unless it ‘sticks.’”
 Or, as Horvath puts it: “It’s the momentary giggle and then
you want another giggle. It’s not about actually learning
anything. It’s about getting a momentary experience to feel as
though you’ve learned something.”
The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want
to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I
used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus
would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a
good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you
recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—
on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working
memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,”
he says.
Sana says that often when we read, there’s a false “feeling
of fluency.” The information is flowing in, we’re understanding it,
it seems like it is smoothly collating itself into a binder to be
slotted onto the shelves of our brains. “But it actually doesn’t
stick unless you put effort into it and concentrate and engage in
certain strategies that will help you remember.”
People might do that when they study, or read something
for work, but it seems unlikely that in their leisure time they’re
going to take notes on Gilmore Girls to quiz themselves later.
“You could be seeing and hearing, but you might not be noticing
and listening,” Sana says. “Which is, I think, most of the time
what we do.”
Still, not all memories that wander are lost. Some of them
may just be lurking, inaccessible, until the right cue pops them
back up—perhaps a pre-episode “Previously on Gilmore Girls”
recap, or a conversation with a friend about a book you’ve both
read. Memory is “all associations, essentially,” Sana says.
That may explain why Paul and others remember the
context in which they read a book without remembering its
contents. Paul has kept a “book of books,” or “Bob,” since she
was in high school—an analog form of externalized memory—in
which she writes down every book she reads. “Bob offers
immediate access to where I’ve been, psychologically and
geographically, at any given moment in my life,” she explains in
My Life With Bob, a book she wrote about her book of books.
“Each entry conjures a memory that may have otherwise gotten
lost or blurred with time.”
In a piece for The New Yorker called “The Curse of Reading
and Forgetting,” Ian Crouch writes, “reading has many facets,
one of which might be the rather indescribable, and naturally
fleeting, mix of thought and emotion and sensory manipulations
that happen in the moment and then fade. How much of reading,
then, is just a kind of narcissism—a marker of who you were and
what you were thinking when you encountered a text?”
To me, it doesn’t seem like narcissism to remember life’s
seasons by the art that filled them—the spring of romance
novels, the winter of true crime. But it’s true enough that if you
consume culture in the hopes of building a mental library that
can be referred to at any time, you’re likely to be disappointed.
Books, shows, movies, and songs aren’t files we upload to
our brains—they’re part of the tapestry of life, woven in with
everything else. From a distance, it may become harder to see a
single thread clearly, but it’s still in there.
“It’d be really cool if memories were just clean—information
comes in and now you have a memory for that fact,” Horvath
says. “But in truth, all memories are everything.”
 My Life With Bob

Keeping Track of Reading Habits With a ‘Book of Books’

By PAMELA PAUL
APRIL 13, 2012

With no small amount of trepidation, I lay open here the first

page of my diary — high-schoolish stabs at intellectualism,
fleeting girlish obsessions, deliberately obscure annotations and
all. After many failed adolescent attempts at keeping a journal,
the summer after my junior year in high school, I finally found a
format I could adhere to: Never mind describing the back-and-
lack-of-forths of unrequited crushes and falling-outs with friends.
I decided to list the books I read instead.
And I’ve stuck with this Book of Books, or Bob, as I’ve come to
call it, ever since. Were my house to burst suddenly into flames,
I would bypass the laptop and photo albums and even, God
forgive me, my children’s artwork in order to rescue Bob, the
record of every book I’ve read or didn’t finish reading since the
summer of 1988.
The impetus for starting my book of books had less to do with
recording my life than with documenting what my
embarrassingly faulty memory failed to hold on to. I often can’t
remember if I’ve read a book or not, nor do I remember the
barest substance of those I have. A former beau once demanded
to know the hero’s name in “Of Human Bondage” six months
after I’d read it. “His object of desire’s name was Mildred,” I
answered miserably. Though I’d spent more than 600 pages and
nearly a month with the character, I couldn’t for the life of me
remember his name. (It’s Philip, if you must know.)
Bob may not reveal the identities of individual characters — all
that sort of thing is still lost — but it does show how one book
led to another or prompted a total shift in genre. It records
whether I’ve read an author before, and if so, when. Why had I
left him, and what drew me back? Over the years, it’s become in
certain ways even more of a personal record than a diary might
be, not about what happened but about how what happened
made me think, drove my interests, shaped my ideas.
It’s also become an itinerary of where I’ve been and where
I really was while I was there. During my 20s, when I lived
abroad and traveled frequently, I would annotate Bob with my
location at the time, recording the serendipity of reading a
particular book in a particular place. I remember how, lying in a
dormitory in Mauriac, an unspectacular hamlet in central France
where I was staying on an American Field Service program, I
read the subject of the first entry, inspired by Baryshnikov’s
performance in “Metamorphosis” on Broadway: “The Trial”
(fittingly, an unfinished work).
Location often dictated content. When I backpacked through
western China in the early 1990s, I picked up whatever discards
I could get from passing travelers — Donna Tartt’s “Secret
History”; a middling Tom Sharpe satire; “Ethan Frome.” I
remember reading “Moby-Dick” during a lonely holiday on Ko Phi
Phi, while most vacationers more reasonably nursed hangovers
with potboilers and romance. And reading “A Distant Mirror” in
northern France, where I could visit the nearby Château de
Coucy.
I admitted to Bob when I read self-help or reread old favorites
or tossed aside “Interview With the Vampire” after one chapter,
mystified by its raging popularity. Bob knew that I was
perennially behind on pop-cultural phenomena, that I read “A
Civil Action” and “The Bonfire of the Vanities” years after the
cocktail-party chatter faded. That I never finished “Paradise Lost”
for freshman English. With 24 years of data, Bob reveals as much
about my literary foibles, passing curiosities and guilty pleasures
as any other diary.
For these reasons, I don’t generally share Bob with others.
Whether it stems from envy or disappointment or genuine
outrage, other people’s reactions to Bob are almost universally
negative. “You’re tallying up books like the ticking off of
accomplishments,” one ex-boyfriend accused me, as if I’d
admitted to quantifying parental love or indexing my inner
beauty. “Hurry, go note it in Bob,” he’d gibe every time I closed
a book.
“What does this tell you if you don’t remember anything about
the book?” another asked, suggesting an expanded Bob with a
page of my impressions of each book in its stead. (That lasted
one book; the relationship didn’t last much longer.) “You’re not
seriously going to allow books on tape, are you?” demanded a
third.
Quite a few people just can’t get past the numbers. I didn’t even
think to enumerate my entries until I was somewhere in the
300s, at which point I went back and counted. But I will admit to
satisfaction in the growing tally, if also an element of danger:
Have I read as many books this March as I did last? What’s my
yearly average? What of the long books that slow me down: “The
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” “The Power Broker,” “The
Pickwick Papers”? There’s also the inexorable decline over time,
my rate dropping in response to accumulated responsibilities,
children to care for, piled-up magazines competing for my
attention.
Bob is otherwise showing his age. At some point, I spilled coffee
on him; the gray cover is mottled, and one corner is woody and
bare. Truly hopeless, I occasionally forget to enter a book I’ve
just read. But I always eventually go back, ever faithful, and note
the missing volumes.
Shortly after we met, my husband met Bob and came up with his
own variation, the Blob (Big List of Books), which he enters into
his computer. An upgrade, I decided.

Pamela Paul is the features editor and children’s books editor at the Book
Review.
The Curse of Reading and Forgetting

By Ian Crouch
May 22, 2013

Recently, a colleague mentioned that she had been rereading

Richard Hughes’s “A High Wind in Jamaica,” which was first
published in 1929 and is about a group of creepy little kids who
become the unwanted wards of sad, listless pirates. She praised
it, and her recommendation sent me to Amazon. The title was
familiar, as was the vibrant cover of the New York Review Books
reissue. One cent and $3.99 for shipping, and the book was on
its way. A couple of weeks later, I opened to the first page and
started reading. By the fifth page, I realized that I had read this
novel before, and pretty recently, about three years ago, when
another colleague had also praised it and lent me his copy.
The passage that tipped me off is about the children’s pet cat,
called Tabby, who has a penchant for “mortal sport” with snakes:
Once he got bitten, and they all wept bitterly, expecting to see a
spectacular death-agony; but he just went off into the bush and
probably ate something, for he came back in a few days quite cock-
a-hoop and as ready to eat snakes as ever.

Tabby’s name stood out, as did the creature’s particular daring,

and I had the strange sense of already knowing that the poor
thing was doomed to a gruesome and shocking end: hunted and
murdered by a pack of wild cats, some pages later—by which
time I was marvelling both at the various peculiarities of the book
and at my unsettling ability to forget them.
This passage is also characteristic of the novel more generally.
Its detached and slightly sadistic sense of the animal world is a
prelude to all kinds of violence and injury that befall the book’s
pets and wild things. The phrase “probably ate something” is
oddly fuzzy, the kind of imprecise notion that a child might have
about what cats do when they are unwatched. This kind of
language communicates a lazy innocence mixed with vague
malevolence that gives Hughes’s sense of childhood its special
character. “Cock-a-hoop” is a great old idiomatic phrase—
meaning in this case exulting or boastful—just one of dozens of
such sparklers that flash from the pages.
All of which is to say that “A High Wind in Jamaica” is remarkable
in all kinds of ways—in its diction, its syntax, its characterization,
its imagery, its psychological depth, and its narrative movement.
It opens with a hurricane in Jamaica, which precipitates the
decision by a colonial family to send its children to the safer
haven of England for school. En route, they fall in with those
pirates, captained by an odd Dutchman named Jonsen. The
children are, mostly, better off for their adventure; Jonsen and
his men, less so. The book deconstructs the pirate fable—but is
still, at points, a ripping yarn itself—and, as Francine Prose notes
in her introduction, it is an altogether more sophisticated and
subtle version of “The Lord of the Flies,” which was published
twenty-five years later. It is, simply, entirely memorable, which
makes the fact that I forgot it so thoroughly all the more difficult
to account for.
It’s a bit circular but I cannot recall forgetting another novel
entirely—both the contents of the book and the act of reading it.
Others may be out there, lurking, waiting to spring up and
surprise and dishearten. But, looking at my bookshelves, I am
aware of another kind of forgetting—the spines look familiar; the
names and titles bring to mind perhaps a character name, a turn
of plot, often just a mood or feeling—but for the most part, the
assembled books, and the hundreds of others that I’ve read and
discarded, given away, or returned to libraries, represent a vast
catalogue of forgetting.
This forgetting has serious consequences—but it has superficial
ones as well, mostly having to do with vanity. It has led, at times,
to a discomfiting situation, call it the Cocktail Party Trap (though
this suggests that I go to many cocktail parties, which is itself a
fib). Someone mentions a book with some cachet that I’ve read—
a lesser-known work of a celebrated writer, say Eliot’s “Daniel
Deronda,” to take an example from my shelf—and I smile
knowingly, and maybe add, “It’s wonderful,” or some such thing.
Great so far, I’m part of the in-crowd—and not lying; I did read
it. But then there’s a moment of terror: What if the person
summons up a question or comment with any kind of specificity
at all? Basically, what if she aims to do anything other than
merely brag about having read “Daniel Deronda”? Uh-oh. It’s
about cotton production, right? Maybe blurt something about
that. No, wait, that’s Gaskell’s “North and South.” I must either
vaguely agree with what she says, hoping she isn’t somehow
putting me on or lying herself, or else confess everything, with
some version of the conversation killer: “I read that entire novel
and now can tell you nothing of any consequence about it.” Or
else slink away, muttering about needing to refill a drink.
This embarrassing situation raises practical questions that also
become ones about identity: Do I really like reading? Perhaps it
is a failure of attention—there are times when I notice my own
distraction while reading, and can, in a way, feel myself
forgetting. There is a scarier question, one that might seem like
asking if one is good at breathing, or walking. Am I actually quite
bad at reading after all?
Perhaps, though there is comfort to be had. In April, on a post
by Brad Leithauser about the surprising durability of certain
seemingly disposable words (involuntary memory, essentially),
a reader left a quotation in the comments, which he attributed
to the poet Siegfried Sassoon:
For it is humanly certain that most of us remember very little of what
we have read. To open almost any book a second time is to be
reminded that we had forgotten well-nigh everything that the writer
told us. Parting from the narrator and his narrative, we retain only a
fading impression; and he, as it were, takes the book away from us
and tucks it under his arm.

“Humanly certain.” Well, that puts it to rest. The notion changes

our view of agency a bit. Books aren’t just about us, as readers.
They belong perhaps mainly to the writer, who along with his
narrator, is a thief. I wonder what writers forget about their own
books?
If we are cursed to forget much of what we read, there are still
charms in the moments of reading a particular book in a
particular place. What I remember most about Malamud’s short-
story collection “The Magic Barrel” is the warm sunlight in the
coffee shop on the consecutive Friday mornings I read it before
high school. That is missing the more important points, but it is
something. Reading has many facets, one of which might be the
rather indescribable, and naturally fleeting, mix of thought and
emotion and sensory manipulations that happen in the moment
and then fade. How much of reading, then, is just a kind of
narcissism—a marker of who you were and what you were
thinking when you encountered a text? Perhaps thinking of that
book later, a trace of whatever admixture moved you while
reading it will spark out of the brain’s dark places.
Memory, however, is capricious and deeply unfair. It is why I can
recall nothing about how a cell divides, or very little about “Ode
on a Grecian Urn,” but can sing any number of television theme
songs in the shower. (“Touch has a memory,” Keats wrote—but
I can’t find my copy of his complete poems to test the theory,
and, anyway, I found that quote on Goodreads.) The words that
researchers use about forgetting are all psychically hurtful for
the layperson: interference, confusion, decay—they seem
sinister and remind us of all the sad limitations of the human
brain, and of an inevitable march toward another kind of
forgetting, which comes with age, and what may be final
forgetting, which is death. Yet those same researchers are also
quick to reassure us. Everybody forgets. And forgetting may
even be a key to memory itself—a psychobiological necessity
rather than a character flaw. That could be, but I still wish I could
remember who did what to whom in D. H. Lawrence’s “Women
in Love”—and the actual, rather than pompous and pretend,
reasons why I’ve told people that I preferred “Sons and Lovers.”
Or is it the other way around?
This may be a minor existential drama—and it might simply be
resolved with practical application and a renewed sense of
studiousness. There is ongoing dispute as to the ways in which
memory might, in a general sense, be improvable. But certainly
there are things that we can do to better remember the books
we read—especially the ones that we want to remember (some
novels, like some moments in life, are best forgotten).
A simple remedy to forgetfulness is to read novels more than
once. A professor I had in college would often, to the point of
irony, cite Nabokov’s statement that there is no reading, only
rereading. Yet he was teaching a class in modern fiction, and
assigned books that are generally known as “slim” contemporary
classics. They were short, and we were being tested on them—
we’d be foolish to read them only once. I read them at least
twice, and now remember them. But what about in real life, set
loose from comprehension examinations and left mostly to our
own devices and standards? Should we reread when there is a
nearly endless shelf of books out there to read and a certainly
not-endless amount of time in which to do it? Should I pull out
my copy of Eudora Welty’s “The Optimist’s Daughter” to relearn
its charms—or more truthfully, learn them for the first time—or
should I accept the loss, and move on?
Part of my suspicion of rereading may come from a false sense
of reading as conquest. As we polish off some classic text, we
may pause a moment to think of ourselves, spear aloft, standing
with one foot up on the flank of the slain beast. Another monster
bagged. It would be somehow less heroic, as it were, to bend
over and check the thing’s pulse. But that, of course, is the stuff
of reading—the going back, the poring over, the act of
committing something from the experience, whether it be mood
or fact, to memory. It is in the postmortem where we learn how
a book really works. Maybe, then, for a forgetful reader like me,
the great task, and the greatest enjoyment, would be to read a
single novel over and over again. At some point, then, I would
truly and honestly know it.
Illustration by Matthew Hollister.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for

newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.
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