anchor.diff:  
   It seems that fiction is much easier to remember than non-fiction. Fiction is more visual and easy to grasp. I can recall a plot of a lot of fiction books I've read. As I said I can't do that for non-fiction. The reason for that I think lies in the nature of non-fiction books. Non-fiction books are about ideas. Ideas are abstract concepts. They are not always directly tied to reality. In order to remember such book later, you need to understand it very well. In order to understand non-fiction book you've need to build mental model of this book in your head. Non-fiction authors have a mental model of the world in their heads when they write a book.Your goal is to rebuild that model in your head, to make it physical. Non-fiction sounds a little bit like programming. The code is an abstract expression of author ideas about the world. Your goal is to grasp it now and make it possible to recall in the future.
   
  -Thinking of this difference between fiction and non-fiction I realized that Alain de Botton's The Course of Love written in a most brilliant way. It's written like a novel (fiction) but it has quotes of his main ideas in each chapter (non-fictional ideas in a non-fictional style). Those quotes are important there because sometimes it's not always easy for you to formulate idea nicely even after reading the story. I wonder if there are other books like that? That is an interesting approach for modern journalists, philosophers to take: pick your serious topic and present it in a fictional way but express and highlight your main ideas directly.
  +Thinking of this difference between fiction and non-fiction I realized that Alain de Botton's The Course of Love written in a most brilliant way. It's written like a novel (fiction) but it has quotes of his main ideas in each chapter (non-fictional ideas in a non-fictional style). Those quotes are important there because sometimes it's not always easy for you to formulate idea nicely even after reading the story. 
  +I wonder if there are other books like that? That is an interesting approach for modern journalists, philosophers to take: pick your serious topic and present it in a fictional way but express and highlight your main ideas directly.
   
  -Another good idea is to read books in pairs. I mentioned before Brave New World and Amusing Ourselves to Death. These two books work great together. It's much more difficult to extract true value of Brave New World by yourself. E.x. for me world described by Huxley was scaring but I couldn't formulate all the reasons why it was that way. Postman gives you good explanations why. He gives also real examples from moderns times that you can grasp more easily.
  +Another good idea is to read books in pairs. I mentioned before Brave New World and Amusing Ourselves to Death. 
  +These two books work great together. 
  +It's much more difficult to extract true value of Brave New World by yourself. 
  +E.x. for me world described by Huxley was scaring but I couldn't formulate all the reasons why it was that way. 
  +Postman gives you good explanations why. 
  +He gives also real examples from moderns times that you can grasp more easily.
   
   So it seems that there are possible solutions to the problem of forgetting. It seems that sometimes we can make a process of remembering easier. But I don't think that this is the main takeaway. I think the best thing we can do is to invest more time and effort into reading.
   
  
positive.code: I grew up in a small western town in post-Soviet Ukraine. 
  What was good about that world is that we didn’t have much of now traditional media entertainment. 
  We had only few TV channels (3 to 4 depending on a weather), 
  they didn’t work during the day (so when I was back from school, 
  there were not only no cartoons to watch but also no TV). 
  Every weekday evening we didn’t have electricity for 2 hours. 
  So basically your TV entertainment was reduced to a tiny fraction of the time: 
  we might watch either news or one TV show or one movie. 
  We didn’t have many cartoons either, it was usually 5–10 minutes cartoon during the evening program for the kids and 1 hour of some Disney cartoons on Saturday mornings. That was it.
  
  Now imagine Ukrainian winter in the 90s. You can’t go much outside (because of the weather) and the days are extremely short (it's getting dark around 4PM). So you are spending a lot of time inventing your own entertainment. Reading was usually the top choice. I also had few old video games on the Nintendo-like console. But to be honest I don’t have memories playing video games every day and for long periods of time.
  
  I would spend summers in a village with my grandparents. My usual schedule was following: help grandma to look after chickens before the lunch (it is very boring activity so a book is a savior in that situation) and then play soccer in the evening when it’s not that hot anymore. That is it. The rest of the time you have nothing to do. Once again you need to find your own entertainment, for me, it was cycling and reading. Reading was my favorite activity.
  
  So during elementary school years, evenings without electricity, winters with short days and summers I read a lot. If was mostly adventure books. I didn’t have any reading plan yet. I would pick up some books from local library. During this time I read about adventures of Hercules, The Wonderfull Wizard of Oz, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Timur and His Squad, I’ve read also some fantasy back then (don’t remember titles anymore) and I’ve read more children adventurous literature of the Soviet era.
  
  Those were my first years reading. I think this stage was mostly about adventures (I read some others more serious books at the time, but I think they were rarer at this period). For me, it lasted from 1993 till 1997-98. I would call it “Harry Potter” stage. However, I have never read or watched Harry Potter because the first book was published in 1997 and it came few years later to Ukraine. By that time I was mostly done with this genre.
  
  ### Middle school
  
  
negative.code: 
  I've read several books that I was super excited after finishing. Books like Sapiens, Bruce Lee Striking Thoughts, Bertrand Russell's Best, Ill Fares the Land and few others impressed me a lot, they presented some new ideas I didn't know, some wisdom, approaches etc. They triggered a lot of thought. I was very enthusiastic after each of them but the problem is few month later I couldn't remember a single idea of any of those books. I don't know what I liked about "Sapiens" book, I don't remember what Bruce Lee's insight I liked. The only thing I remember is whether I liked the book or not. I remember my feelings about the book, not the ideas presented in it.
  
  I recently finished reading two books that go well together: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. This is truly the most powerful pair of books I've read in years. After finishing those two books I've got scared that in 3 months I would forget what I liked about them and what were the ideas of those books. And I don't want to forget. 
  Those books contain ideas of high importance. The same is true about books I enumerated above.
  
  So what should I do?
  
  