How to Better Internalize the Books You Read
A reflection from Charlotte Mason's book A Philosophy of Education
For a life-long bookworm, finding the time and desire to read isn’t typically a problem—you’ll catch us hidden in a closet reading a few pages before the kids start screaming or curled up in bed with a bedside lamp on while the rest of the house snores. We carry books with us to read while waiting in line or in an office. We know how to use those tiny pockets of time to cram fifty or more books in by the end of the year. But remembering all the content we read… that can be the difficult part.
We read often because we love stories and expanding our knowledge. Our brains are hungry for ideas and we are eager to feed them with the best of literary ideas. We don’t want all this knowledge we poured over to simply fall out of our heads while we read the next great book—yet it often does. We gnaw on our bottom lip as we glance at the bookshelf, wondering what that blue-spine book was about. We flip past the bright pink highlighted section and wonder why we even emphasized that line.
As busy (and sometimes scatter-brained) people, how do we better retain the words we read? Perhaps we can look to the words of a wise educator from the 1800–1900s: Charlotte Mason.
The Principles of Narration
Charlotte Mason sought to change the way people and educators thought about educating children. She despised the idea of spoon-feeding pre-chewed thoughts and opinions to children through dry textbooks and twaddle-ridden children’s books. She believed that the mind feeds off ideas, and that children, being born persons with the capacity to understand and grasp raw ideas, needed ideas presented in literary style to nourish them. She had a high view of children and their capabilities, and believed teachers of her day were putting far too much energy into entertaining their students and distilling ideas to a far too basic level.
If drowning literature in spoon-fed, dry facts isn’t the way to learn from it, what is? Charlotte Mason believed that the best way we internalize and make connections with these ideas is through narration. Narration is the act of retelling (not repeating) something that you have read after only one reading. This engages our imaginations and requires our full attention to a piece of literature, which makes it so effective.
Mason instructed parents and teachers to bring good, literary books to their students of history and fiction and allow them to feast upon those stories to derive the lessons. She encouraged teachers to simply read the books out loud to their students (or have them read it to themselves) and then narrate the contents back to the class. Narration isn’t a word-for-word repetition of what was read—rather, it’s a re-telling where our brains take the ideas and descriptions we heard and relays them back in a way that makes sense to us. In this way, our minds make those necessary connections to previously established ideas we already have, connecting this new thought into the web built in our brains. This is how memory is saved and stored away.
How to Use Narration
While Mason intended this to happen in homes or classrooms when educating children, we can still engage in this practice as adults too. We can do this through discussing a book with a friend, writing reviews or essays in reaction to what we read, telling our spouse what we’re learning, or discussing a topic from the book with our families. Narration isn’t only for the classroom; narration can be a part of our daily lives as we tuck ideas and knowledge away in our hearts and minds. As Miss Mason wrote,
“[Children] must read the given pages and tell what they have read, they must perform, that is, what we may call the act of knowing. We are all aware, alas, what a monstrous quantity of printed matter has gone into the dustbin of our memories, because we have failed to perform that quite natural and spontaneous ‘act of knowing,’ as easy to a child as breathing and, if we would believe it, comparatively easy to ourselves.”1
Mason said that the reward for narration is two-fold: Not only does it better internalize the ideas we capture, but it also increases our attention. In Mason’s schools, the teachers were instructed to not repeat what they read for a child who wasn’t listening or missed a specific part of the reading. Instead, the children were required to retain what they heard and narrate it back without consulting the text a second time. This required the students to establish a strong habit of paying attention and listening well, and we can train ourselves likewise.
Reading Less, Remembering More
Perhaps establishing this habit will mean you read less books, because you must devote some of your reading time to narrating the text in some manner. What does it mean if you can’t finish all those books on your list, or complete the reading challenge you committed to?
In grade school, people rolled their eyes and sighed every time I read out loud. Whenever we were in reading groups, I felt ashamed when my friends and classmates finished the book while I was still on chapter five. Because of that, I set out to be a faster reader and read as many books each year as I could—yet despite the number of books I read growing each year, I still berated myself for reading as much as so-and-so.
As an adult, I realized there were no gold stars for reading 1769 books in a year. What will make a lasting change in my life? Remembering and applying what I read. Rather than focusing on the quantity of books I read, I’m learning to choose high quality books and find ways to better internalize them—often with narration, either in written form or by discussing with a friend (or following my husband around the house speaking raptures about what I just read).
At the end of the day, reading two book goods slowly and discerning how to apply them is better than skim-reading three hundred books yet knowing nothing about them. If narration slows your reading down so you can better understand and narrate what you learned well, then that is for the better.
Narration is a skill that most of us have likely rarely used, yet it’s a gift that remains inside us waiting to be used since childhood. At first, your narrations might be a bit weak and rickety, but overtime the skill will grow with practice. Press on, and you will one day see the fruit this habit bears.
Charlotte M. Mason, A Philosophy of Education, of The Home Education Series (Living Books Press, 2017), 99.
My bookshelf grows and my memory shrinks. My Kindle expands as if it were alive, and I never scroll to the bottom of my library. LOL, I was foolish to think I could ever put into practice all the ideas in those books, let alone remember them!