Why do you feel you need to remember them so much? and that there even is something to get out of every book? I feel if something you come across is truly indispensable to know, you'll remember it. Most things aren't so we don't.
In fact, I try to keep as much stuff OUT of my brain as possible. I think of my brain as an index, the smaller it is, the better. In relation to books, this means I highlight anything I find interesting, but otherwise rarely do much else Also just because you don't remember a book doesn't mean it didn't change you. After I read a book, if it was good, it will probably be on my mind for a while as I relate things I learned in it to things I knew.
Later if I want to look something up I'll remember what book it was in, just not the specifics. I don't just do this for books either, I do it for webpages all the time. Currently I am using an extension called Liner to save highlights. For things I'm actively researching for some reason or another, I extract all the highlights out when I'm finished and save them to a note, (I used to do this in Evernote, but I've since switched to Scrivener).
If a book has particularly important information but is dense, and I know I'll need the info later, but later it's very likely I'll forget it, for example, for school, I'll just make nice study-like notes, extracting the useful stuff. In fact, for school, those notes were my study notes, and I would just take exams then promptly forget everything. In case I actually needed the info, the notes existed.
Now that I think about it, this is all why I took to writing lots of comments in my code. Makes it a breeze to drop and pick up projects again. Cannot understand pro-"self-documenting code" people. I've also started documenting any large installs, complicated setups, etc, in gists lately. Very useful.
In fact, I try to keep as much stuff OUT of my brain as possible. I think of my brain as an index, the smaller it is, the better. In relation to books, this means I highlight anything I find interesting, but otherwise rarely do much else Also just because you don't remember a book doesn't mean it didn't change you. After I read a book, if it was good, it will probably be on my mind for a while as I relate things I learned in it to things I knew.
Later if I want to look something up I'll remember what book it was in, just not the specifics. I don't just do this for books either, I do it for webpages all the time. Currently I am using an extension called Liner to save highlights. For things I'm actively researching for some reason or another, I extract all the highlights out when I'm finished and save them to a note, (I used to do this in Evernote, but I've since switched to Scrivener).
If a book has particularly important information but is dense, and I know I'll need the info later, but later it's very likely I'll forget it, for example, for school, I'll just make nice study-like notes, extracting the useful stuff. In fact, for school, those notes were my study notes, and I would just take exams then promptly forget everything. In case I actually needed the info, the notes existed.
Now that I think about it, this is all why I took to writing lots of comments in my code. Makes it a breeze to drop and pick up projects again. Cannot understand pro-"self-documenting code" people. I've also started documenting any large installs, complicated setups, etc, in gists lately. Very useful.