I’ve stepped up my reading in preparation for my paper, practically
inhaling research papers and books. It’s easy to copy and paste
quotations from PDFs of research papers, but dead-tree books are
harder to handle. I’m relatively happy with the way I’m doing things,
though. Here’s how it works.

When I start a book, I record the name of the book into my voice
recorder. As I read, I note interesting quotations by recording the
page number and the quotation as one file. In this way, I accumulate
dozens of notes. When I have time to encode all of these, I loop over
each file while transcribing whatever I can keep up with. I repeat
each file as many times as necessary.

This has the effect of usual several modes for the information: visual
when I read it for the first time, auditory when I hear myself read
it, and kinesthetic when I type it out.

It’s slower, but I hope it works well!

Random Emacs symbol: global-mark-ring-max – Variable: *Maximum size of global mark ring. Start discarding off end if gets this big.