How To Read Deeper — The Importance of a Commonplace Book

Robin Waldun · YouTube · ~7 minutes

Rescued from a bare URL in Kyle’s Apple Note “Learning & Speaking” (p2081) on 2026-08-31, which had never been archived. Transcript supplied by Kyle and cleaned below.

Summary

A short argument against reading for volume, and for keeping a commonplace book as the mechanism that makes deep reading stick.

The case against the hundred-book year. Waldun’s opening complaint is with people who “rave on and on about ‘I’ve read a hundred books this year.’” Quantity is easy to define and easy to optimise — you just read more — which is exactly what makes it a “pseudo achievement.” The failure mode is precise: read a hundred books and you risk understanding none of them, which produces “a second degree of ignorance… a doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge.” He borrows Alexander Pope’s phrase for it: “a bookful blockhead, ignorantly read.”

Why memory can’t carry it. The brain “is not a computer” — it forgets what you want kept and keeps what doesn’t matter. Critical reflections are the first thing lost, because they sit at the intersection of many concepts and are hard to retrieve unless you are already well versed. Ask someone five days later what they thought of Eliot’s The Waste Land and “he’s going to draw a blank.”

The commonplace book as the fix. Not memorised passages — “there’s no point memorizing passages from a book” — but collected passages paired with your own private reflections, plus the interconnections between books, which he singles out as the most valuable and most perishable part. He calls it “a personal encyclopedia,” “your own personal library of your notes.”

The tooling is incidental. Waldun started in the margins, moved to OneNote (which he found scattered, with weak linking between documents), and at the time of recording had just switched to Notion — database of books tagged reading / read / pending, notes expandable inside each entry, plus an “ideas” table for articles and references to draw on later, and mobile capture for stray thoughts. He is explicit that the app doesn’t matter: “you might not like Notion, you can use something else, but here’s the central idea — when you want to read deeper you have to have a system for you to organize the ideas.”

The line that carries it: “Don’t trust your brain, because your brain’s flaky.”

Why Kyle saved it

Filed in the Learning & Speaking note alongside the learning/rhetoric tweets. The relevance is close to home: the commonplace book is the direct ancestor of this wiki. Waldun’s three requirements — verbatim passages, the reader’s own reflections attached to them, and the interconnections between sources recorded rather than remembered — are the shape of a wiki/books/ page (## Highlights verbatim, > **Kyle:** notes inline, ## Connections wired out). His complaint about OneNote’s weak linking is the argument for wikilinks; his warning that interconnections are the first thing lost is the argument for the reciprocity passes.

It also sits directly against the quantity framing: Kyle’s own library is ~265 books read, and this is the case for why that number is the least interesting fact about it.

Transcript

Cleaned from the YouTube auto-transcript Kyle supplied — punctuation and paragraphing added, ASR artifacts corrected (book for blockhead → “bookful blockhead”, proust's swan's way, Somerset Maugham). Timestamps preserved. No content summarised, reordered, or removed.

(00:00) Now here’s a personal pet peeve of mine. I don’t like people who rave on and on and on about, you know, “I’ve read a hundred books this year.” If you place a heavier emphasis on quantity over quality — now, please turn off this video. Personally I think the quality of reading is much more important than the quantity of reading. If you’ve watched any of my videos you know that’s a common theme of what exactly we’re doing here. I want you to walk away from a book feeling like your life just opened up. I want your perception to change after reading a really great piece of literature. I want your world to alter. I want you to have a brand new understanding of the life that you occupy. But that’s not that easy to do.

(00:29) You see, the quantity of reading — how many books you’ve read — that’s very easy to define. You just have to read, and read more, and read even more, and then you have this pseudo-achievement happening. You can read a hundred books in a year and that’s going to sound very impressive at dinner parties.

(00:57) But you know what? If you want to read 100 books per year, you run the risk of not understanding a single one of them. And in that sense you’re developing a second degree of ignorance. That second degree of ignorance is a doctoral ignorance that comes after knowledge. So you can have the knowledge — you’ve read 100 books — but you understand none of it. Or, in the words of Alexander Pope, you are “a bookful blockhead, ignorantly read.”

(01:25) So given that we want to read for depth, we want to read for understanding, when we want to read deeper into books there has to be something — a mechanism, something that keeps you on track. Because the human brain, as amazing as the human brain is, it’s not a computer. It can’t store information in the same way that a computer stores information. Therefore we tend to forget things when we don’t want to forget them, and we tend to remember silly things that don’t really matter. So how do we work with this machine, this thing right here, to help us read deeper into literature? That is what we’re going to talk about today.

(01:54) And I’m going to show you something really cool that I haven’t talked about in a while. I talked about this concept before, about two years ago, and that was one of the first videos that really blew up — and that concept was, or is, the concept of having a commonplace book to deepen your understanding of books. Starting a commonplace book is one of the best things that I’ve done for myself over the past few years. Through reading a lot of books, taking down critical notes, journaling and critically reflecting on these books — I think that’s one of the best ways that you can ingest literature in a really deep fashion.

(02:22) There’s no point memorizing passages from a book. But if you have private reflections with regards to some of the passages that you’ve collected — excellent. Most people make the mistake of “hey, I can just remember that in my head.” But five days later you ask the same person, “hey, what did you think of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land?” — he’s going to draw a blank. Here’s the fact: your brain is not going to remember everything that you’ve concocted.

(02:49) Your brain isn’t going to latch onto those critical reflections that you’ve had. Your brain is pretty terrible at holding onto this very elaborate information, because those pieces of information are so interconnected with many other concepts. It’s very hard sometimes to retrieve the information if you’re not that well versed in it — and if you don’t even have a device or storage for you to store those critical insights that popped out when you were reading a really, really good piece of literature, that’s setting you up for not understanding the hundred books that you’ve read.

(03:14) So this is why you definitely need a commonplace book. This is why you definitely need a personal encyclopedia. This is your own personal library of your notes, a depository of all of the crap that you’ve read. This is a depository of all your personal reflections on a book, and also the interconnections between the books that you’ve read. All those very valuable interconnections — they need to be documented. Your brain is a very stupid machine, doesn’t remember that much, and your brain is constantly occupied by daily matters.

(03:41) You definitely need a system for you to take all of that in, to put in all of this information, and to store and organize this information in a very effective, very efficient fashion. So before the commonplace book I took a lot of notes in the margins of the book, but a little later on I realized I really need a central system to compile all of these notes together. That’s when I first started using OneNote. But today I’m going to tell you something else — something better than OneNote.

(04:08) OneNote is great, but it’s kind of scattered, it’s kind of all over the place. The organization on OneNote isn’t exactly that great; the linking between documents is just not that efficient. But nevertheless I stuck with OneNote for a very, very long time. It’s kind of painful at times to organize my ideas. But right now, just about two weeks ago, I bumped into Notion — and this video is not sponsored by Notion, it’s just a really cool tool that you can definitely make good use out of.

(04:38) I have Notion on my computer. Basically Notion is this all-in-one productivity system. It’s great. You can search up other videos on how to use it — I’m not going to tell you how to use it, I’m just going to show you how I like to utilize Notion for my book notes. So I have a list of all the books that I want to read, and they’re all labeled as reading, read, or pending. As I scroll down the list I know exactly which book I should read next, I know exactly which book I’m reading currently, and I know exactly how many books I’ve read in the past.

(05:06) It’s a very effective system. You can customize the tags, you can do everything that you want. And even better, you can expand the page on each one of the notes and take notes in that section, so you don’t have to jump around from one note to Evernote and to a website or something like that. Besides books I also have this ideas dump — so whenever I come across a really interesting article in a magazine or from a website, my ideas dump is full of these articles, full of these references that I can later draw on to make videos, or to write articles, or to write blog posts on.

(05:34) So as a whole it’s a very effective system. Then again, I’m not going to teach you how to use it — if you want to learn how to use Notion, just search on the internet, there are tons of videos that can tell you how to actually use this app as a very effective note-taking system. But for me personally it’s a perfect commonplace book. And on the other hand it also works on your phone, so when I have a random thought here and there I just document it on my phone. It’s completely fantastic.

(06:04) So check out the application Notion. It’s completely free, you can use it however you want, organize it, come up with your own medium, read the books that you want and read those books deeper. Record your personal thoughts on a system like Notion. You might not like Notion — you can use something else. But here’s the central idea: when you want to read deeper you have to have a system for you to organize the ideas. Otherwise all those things are going to go haywire, and after a month or something you’re going to forget everything that you’ve read.

(06:33) Don’t trust your brain, because your brain’s flaky. You want a system to document everything down, and I think Notion currently is my favorite system to do that. Thank you for watching this week’s episode. If you haven’t signed up for the newsletter be sure to do so — each week we have exclusive goodies coming at you from the newsletter. This week specifically I was honored to go on to the Socratic Method podcast, and we discussed the ins and outs of one of my favorite books of all time, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way.

(06:58) So if you’re interested in that podcast episode, head over to the Socratic Method podcast YouTube page to watch the episode on Swann’s Way, and sign up for the newsletter. Anyway — R.C. Waldun here, and I shall be signing off right about now.

Connections

• Tools For Thought — the draft this most directly feeds; Waldun’s OneNote complaint (weak linking between documents) is the argument for a linked system over a filing system.
• Notetaking · Reading Strategy · Reading — the method itself.
• Learning — the concept page this was saved under; the source note was “Learning & Speaking”.
• Notion — the tool he lands on, explicitly framed as incidental to the method.
• Commonplace Book — the practice, older than any of the software.