By Jane Sonnenschein · March 20, 2026

Yesterday, I wrote an essay reflecting on the controversy around a book influencer who had been called out online. A few people who genuinely create book-related content showed up in the comments. Some pointed out that I had misunderstood a few details in the earlier story, and I accept that.

But compared with those factual corrections, it was another comment that really made me stop and think.

That person wrote something along these lines: reading can sometimes feel heavy and dull. Sometimes you need to stop for a long time and let what you’ve read slowly settle. You don’t remember the memorable quotes, and whenever you force yourself to write reading notes, apart from the occasional good one, most of them end up feeling like something you’ve vomited back up after failing to digest it properly.

Unfortunately, for some reason, that comment disappeared not long afterward.

But when I first read it, something in me immediately responded.

The image was not exactly pleasant, but it was almost brutally accurate. It captured something I had often felt when reading other people’s book notes: there may be a lot of writing, and clearly a lot of effort, but the result still feels dry and flat, as though something that has not yet been properly digested has simply been brought back up.

That was the moment I suddenly wanted to sit down and seriously write about what reading actually means to me.

To be honest, I have never really agreed with the standard way people are often expected to write reading notes.

For many people, finishing a book seems to mean extracting the important points, organizing the author’s structure, summarizing what the author was trying to say, and preferably making a mind map at the end. Only then does it somehow count as having truly “read” the book.

But the older I get, the less meaningful that kind of reading feels to me.

Because the real value of reading has never been whether you can summarize the author’s ideas all over again.

What matters is whether there was a sentence, a scene or a small passage that genuinely hit you.

And once it hit you, did you keep thinking?

What did it remind you of? Which part of your own life did it touch? Which knot inside you did it loosen—or perhaps tighten? Which old wound did it force you to look at? Did it suddenly help you understand something you had never quite been able to make sense of before?

If none of that happens, and all you do is copy down a sentence, think, “Wow, that’s so true,” and stop there, then for you it is still only a beautiful sentence.

I increasingly think this is one of the biggest problems with a lot of book content.

Of course people can be struck by a sentence in a book. They may copy it down carefully, organize their notes and turn it into a post. But very often, they stop at the moment of being struck.

They say, “This is so true.”

Or, “This is so healing.”

Or, “I absolutely need to remember this.”

But if a sentence has really reached you, shouldn’t there be another question after that?

What exactly is true about it, and why?

What does it have to do with my own life?

Which specific experiences in me does it touch?

Can it help me grow a thought of my own?

A lot of people never take that next step.

And perhaps that is why so many reading notes end up feeling dry and flat, like a record of what someone read rather than something that has truly passed through them. Or, to borrow that commenter’s rather harsh metaphor, like vomit.

It is a brutal comparison, but I understood it immediately.

Because sometimes what looks like “output” is really just material being brought back up before it has been properly digested.

It has not yet become part of the person. No real transformation has taken place inside them, and readers can feel that emptiness.

That is also why I often struggle to finish reading other people’s book notes.

It is not necessarily because those people are shallow or because they have nothing to say. Quite the opposite. Sometimes you see someone write a long, thoughtful comment, or you talk with them and immediately sense that there is a real person in there, with experience and ideas.

And then you open their profile and try to read their book notes, and somehow you still cannot get through them.

There is a dense block of words sitting there. The sentences feel dry, the formatting gives you no room to breathe. You can sense that the person has something inside them, but they have not yet found a way to express it that allows another person to enter.

That has made me understand something more and more clearly:

Having thoughts does not automatically mean you know how to write them for someone else.

Having substance does not automatically mean you know how to express it.

So if I write book reviews or reflections in the future, I probably will not spend much time retelling people what the book is about.

What I would rather write is this:

Which sentence in the book hit me? Why did it hit me? How did it connect with something I had actually lived through? And what new thought began to grow from that connection?

Because the interesting part of reading, to me, is not whether you can summarize the author’s thinking. It is whether something in the book has actually done something to you.

I have never really thought of myself as someone who reads an enormous number of books.

In the past, people sometimes read my writing and left comments under my WeChat Official Account posts—a public publishing format within WeChat—assuming that I must have read a huge number of books.

I usually did not bother correcting them, but the truth is, I have never been someone who reads endless shelves of serious literary classics.

If anything, I used to read mostly novels. A lot of them were love stories, lighter books, the kind that gave me a little room to breathe and step outside real life for a while.

I have never particularly liked tragedies either.

Not because I am shallow, but because life already contains enough suffering. Why would I deliberately put another layer of suffering into my own heart?

I used to tell friends that I was the kind of person who liked writing tragedies but did not like reading them. If I knew in advance that a story was terribly sad, sometimes I simply would not read it at all.

Eventually, I also made peace with something else: if I cannot get into a book, I do not have to force myself to finish it.

Not everyone needs to read the books that “everyone says you should read” in order to prove that they have depth.

There are actually very few books that have had a lasting influence on me. But when one does, that influence is real.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for example.

That stream-of-consciousness style affected me deeply at the time, and it even changed the way I later wrote. Reading that book was one of the first times I had a strong realization that a novel could actually be written like this.

The metaphors, the imagery, the stream of consciousness, the way one layer of thought unfolded into another, even those moments when the writing was not immediately easy to understand—this was exactly the kind of expression I had always been drawn to myself.

At the time, I had this very strong feeling that I had suddenly found someone of my own kind. Or perhaps I had finally discovered a kind of home for the way I wanted to write.

Another example is Cognitive Awakening.

At the time, I was extremely lost. I was caught in constant inner conflict and anxiety, going around and around in the same thoughts. That book was the first thing that made me vaguely realize that many of these struggles actually had a structure to them. It was not just me. I was not uniquely tangled or uniquely unable to figure things out.

I read that book more than once, and I also listened to it twice.

It was not a book where every sentence struck me, but during that particular period of my life, it genuinely helped me.

So whether a book matters has very little to do with whether it is considered a classic, or whether you can accurately repeat everything the author said.

What matters is whether it left a trace in you.

Some books pass through you and disappear.

With others, you may remember only one small passage, but that passage stays somewhere inside you for years and slowly changes the way you see the world.

If that happens, then for you, that book has already mattered.

I have also come to feel that life does not really suffer from a lack of methods.

There are endless books about personal growth. Endless books offering frameworks and advice. Every one of them seems to be healing you, telling you to let go, to love yourself, to restart slowly, to remember that you deserve a better life.

But anyone who has actually lived through difficult periods knows that understanding something is never as simple as reading one sentence.

And “starting over” does not happen just because the phrase sounds beautiful.

A lot of books make these things sound too easy.

As if someone wakes up one morning and suddenly understands everything.

As if one sentence can make you release the past.

As if learning to “be kinder to yourself” immediately turns the page on your whole life.

Reality is nothing like that.

Really coming to understand something is often slow, and it can be painful.

Behind it are very specific struggles, very specific places where you get stuck, repeated attempts, setbacks, and moments when you run into the same wall again. A beautiful line of writing does not suddenly transform a person. Buying a book, saving a post, or being moved for a few minutes by something someone says in a livestream does not instantly give you a new way of living.

That is why I have become increasingly cautious around content that is especially good at talking about “starting over,” “healing,” or “suddenly understanding everything.”

It is not that every sentence in this kind of content is wrong.

The problem is that it often makes a process that is complicated, difficult and deeply specific to a person’s life look far too simple.

And sometimes what it touches is not your growth at all.

It simply comforts the part of you that desperately wants to feel better right now. 

Looking back now, I think I finally understand why I have become less and less interested in the standard form of reading notes.

It is not because I am against taking notes, and it is not because I am against copying down memorable sentences.

What I resist is letting reading stop there—at the quotation, at the moment of surprise, at “Wow, this is so true.”

Because a memorable sentence is not the destination.

At most, it is an entrance.

If a sentence truly reaches you, it should not remain on the page. It should keep moving: into your experiences, into your judgments, into those things inside you that you have never quite been able to explain but that have been sitting there for years.

Then, through reflection, digestion and time, it slowly becomes something of your own.

That is the point when reading becomes more than collecting quotations.

That is the point when a book has actually begun to work on you.

So if I write about books again in the future, I probably will not try to summarize them for the author.

I will only write about which sentence hit me, why it hit me, and what part of my own life it touched.

Because more and more, I believe this:

Reading is not about collecting quotes. What matters is what they become inside you.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 读书不是摘抄，转化才是

German version: Lesen ist nicht das Sammeln von Zitaten – entscheidend ist die Verwandlung