How to remember the books you read

I can’t believe that I’m about to say this, but my mother was right.  She was right when she was trying to make me keep a journal of the books that I read.  When I was a kid, after I finished a book, before she would let me start another one, she would make me sit down and write down the book title, author and a synopsis of the story.  Of course, as a kid, I would rebel, try to get out of doing this — after all, I had great memory and would never forget any book that I read. Or would I?

Not long ago I happened to pick up at my local library a copy of Moby Dick.  As I started reading the book, some part of me was incredulous at the fact that I never read this classic of American literature before.  Yet another part of me seemed to remember some bits and pieces, seemed to remember reading it before.  As I sat there, I came to realize that I’ve forgotten a great many books that I had read.  I always thought that I could remember the obvious ones, the classics, the monumental works of fiction.  But something like Moby Dick?  I would expect myself to remember it and yet I wasn’t sure.  The early signs of old age?  Alzheimer’s?  Call it what you will, but I’m forgetting the books that I read.

So now I’m on this kick to remember and list as many books as possible.  The obvious ones are the ones I own. I wonder if my library can pull up a list of everything I had borrowed over the years.

Like Sherlock Holmes, I find that my brain is not able to store every bit of information I come across.  There is simply not enough room for information that is not relevant to the functions of my day-to-day life.  Like Sherlock Holmes who chose not to know that Earth is round, I choose not to remember every birthday and every book — I choose to use technology!

True to the Information Age, I found a website LibraryThing.com that lets you keep a list of books you own.  I’m cheating and using it to keep a list of books I read: the ones I own and the ones I don’t.  I just hope that one of the site’s 500,000 members won’t call my bluff and ask to borrow a book I don’t own.