For years, I believed highlighters were the greatest invention since sliced bread. I built an impressive collection—yellow (two shades), blue, orange, green, red. If it came in a color, I owned it. I love to read, and I love to highlight. Depending on the book, I might mark only a few lines…or drown entire pages in neon. It was bliss.
Few things matched the pleasure of settling into my leather chair in front of a roaring fire with a cup of tea, a book, and a highlighter—until the moment the highlighter betrayed me. Nothing kills momentum like dragging a dried-out marker across the page, leaving only a ghost of a line. So, like any resourceful reader, I developed a system: a highlighter bullpen. When the starter dried up, I reached for a reliever. But dried ink turned out to be the least of my problems.
The deeper issue was simple: highlighting didn’t work. Not for me. And research confirms it. Effective note-taking—the kind that actually improves retention—comes from flashcards or structured systems like Cornell Notes. Highlighting only traces the words; it doesn’t help you remember them. And that’s the whole point, right? You highlight because you’re sure you won’t remember.
Which brings me to my next problem: too many books.
I have hundreds of them. Over time, I realized I could never find what I needed. The process went like this: I’d want to revisit a passage… but from what book? If I remembered the book, I then had to find the book. If I found the book, I then had to hunt for the highlight. If I couldn’t remember the quote, what chance did I have of remembering the book?
Technology seemed like the fix. Enter the e-book.
Electronic readers like the Kindle are a dream for book lovers—but they still don’t solve the highlighting issue. In many ways, they make it worse. Now I have to remember which format the book is in. If it’s digital, I have to load the right one, then scroll through a parade of highlights until I find the right passage. Tedious. Inefficient.
And audiobooks? Forget it. You can’t highlight the narrator’s voice. The rise of audiobooks was the breaking point. While listening to my first one, I realized I needed a completely different system. I didn’t just want notes—I wanted centralized, retrievable, readable notes.
So I went old-school.
I bought a stack of black-and-white composition notebooks and began jotting notes while reading. Because I usually read multiple books at once, I needed several notebooks in rotation. When I finished a book, I transferred my scribbles into a single binder, alphabetized by title. And I didn’t stop there: I created a separate All-Star notebook filled only with the strongest, most meaningful passages—my personal highlight reel.
The system was a compromise. I still need to know which book a passage came from, but with all notes organized in one binder, retrieval became fast. Over time, I found myself revisiting the binder, the composition notebooks, and the All-Star notebook more often—sometimes without looking for anything specific. I’ll grab one at random the way some people flip through old photo albums.
And yes—I still use highlighters. Some habits are just too hard to break.
