Keep the ideas
worth returning to.
Kindle highlights, photographed pages, and notebooks of your own — kept together, written beside, and brought back to you before you have forgotten why they mattered.
- Kindle clippings
- A photo of a page
- Your own notebooks
Start your library.
Bring in the books you have already read, and let the passages you kept come back to you.
wrenreads
Rediscovery, built in.
Reading ends. The useful part should not.
A highlight you never open again is only a bookmark. Keep the passage, the book and your response together, and the idea can still be found months later.
Unknown book
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
No book. No reason. No return.
The ideas come back before you have forgotten why they mattered.
Every passage you keep is put on a widening schedule. You see it tomorrow, then in three days, then a week, a fortnight, a month — out to six months. Seeing it again is the whole action. There is no score, no right answer, and no way to fail a day when nothing is due.
Quieten a book you have finished with, or ask for a passage more often. Nothing is deleted to make room.
- Todaykept
- 1 day+1d
- 3 days+3d
- 1 week+7d
- 2 weeks+14d
- 1 month+30d
- 2 months+60d
- 6 months+180d
Passages from every book you read, kept in one library.
Atomic Habits
34 highlights
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
Chapter 1 · Kindle highlight
Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
Chapter 2 · Kindle highlight
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
Chapter 1 · Kindle highlight
Your note
The vote metaphor is the useful half. It sets the unit of change at one action, not one decision — which is why willpower keeps being the wrong thing to argue about.
Write beside the idea, not somewhere else.
One standing note for what a passage means to you, and a dated log beneath it for the thought you had today. Neither leaves the passage.
Thinking, Fast and Slow · Daniel Kahneman
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
Chapter 38 · photographed page
Your note
The focusing illusion is the one I keep needing. Whatever I am currently upset about is being weighted by the fact that I am currently thinking about it, and by nothing else.
Ask what your reading has taught you.
Ask across everything you have saved. Answers come back with the passages they were drawn from, so you can check the source yourself.
Why do I keep failing to do the things I meant to do?
Three of your books answer this differently. Clear moves the blame off the goal and onto the system underneath it. Burkeman says the premise is wrong — the plan was never finishable, so the skill is choosing what to drop. Kahneman adds that whatever you are worrying about right now is being over-weighted simply because you are thinking about it.
From your library
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. — Atomic Habits
The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things. — Four Thousand Weeks
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. — Thinking, Fast and Slow
Thinking, Fast and Slow · Daniel Kahneman
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.
Chapter 38 · photographed page
Your note
The focusing illusion is the one I keep needing. Whatever I am currently upset about is being weighted by the fact that I am currently thinking about it, and by nothing else.
Ask a question. Watch where the answer comes from.
The passages below are real, and the answers are drawn only from them. Choose a question and the sources it used will surface underneath.
Choose a question to see what your library remembers.
Demo — try a question above
The old practice, rebuilt for the way we read now.
Writers and scholars kept commonplace books to collect quotations, observations, and arguments they expected to use again. WrenReads preserves that discipline without the indexing work: capture the passage, add your response, and return through search or conversation.
Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.
What people ask before they start.
How do I get my highlights in?
Import the My Clippings.txt file your Kindle already keeps, or a CSV export — everything arrives grouped by book, with the passage text left exactly as it was. For a print book, photograph the page and the text is read off the image.
Can I write something that did not come from a book?
Yes. Notebooks are containers you create and name yourself — for a theme, a question, or your own thinking. What you write in them is kept and resurfaced exactly like a passage from a book.
What if I have thousands of highlights?
You set how often any book surfaces — including never, for one you are done with — and you can ask for a particular passage more or less often. A day with nothing due is a finished day, not a backlog.
What does chat use as its source?
Only what you have saved. Answers cite the passages they drew on, so you can open the original and judge it yourself rather than taking the summary on trust.
Build a library of ideas, not a graveyard of highlights.
Start with the books you have already read.