I used to be an avid reader, and over the last few years, I’ve been trying to get back to my reading habit. I read a lot more than I used to, but life gets in the way, and while finishing a book is easy, remembering what I learned from it tends to be significantly harder. Especially now that I am not adding copious bookmarks and margin notes to the pages of my physical copies.
Like many Kindle users, I highlight passages constantly while reading, but the issue is that those highlights often end up forgotten inside the Kindle, or I might rarely export them to a notes app, but I don’t really do anything much with them.
Over the last few months, I’ve started pairing my Kindle with Claude, and it’s fundamentally changed how I approach reading. Instead of treating my highlights as passive notes, I now use Claude to actively process, organize, and connect ideas from the books that I’ve read. It’s helped me get significantly more value from the books I’ve been reading. Here’s why every reader should give it a shot.
I finally found a use for my Kindle highlights
Turning disconnected notes into actionable insights
It’s a simple trap to fall into, but as a reader, you keep highlighting all the important bits in a book that you might be reading, thinking that you will get back to them, eventually. A highlighted sentence might feel useful at the moment, but six months later, it’s just a disconnected thought without any additional context. That doesn’t help.
Now, whenever I finish a non-fiction book, I export my Kindle highlights and upload them to Claude. Instead of scrolling through disconnected passages or even sentences, trying to remember why I marked them, I immediately start asking myself questions.
So, for example, if I have a dozen different highlights from a single book, I might ask it a question based on these highlights: “What are the five most important ideas from this book?” The answer is, unsurprisingly, much more useful than reading through every single highlight individually. Claude can identify patterns that aren’t immediately obvious, or even if they are, it expects you to have read the entire book. While a book might spend hundreds of pages exploring a certain topic, Claude can surface the core principles in a few minutes. It is not a replacement for reading, but it is a great refresher.
Similarly, I like asking Claude for summaries tailored to specific goals. You might be reading something like “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu, but you could ask Claude to come up with actionable advice from the book for running a business. If you’re reading a book on psychology, you could ask Claude to identify practical lessons that can be applied to everyday decision-making. This helps convert insights from books into summaries that are actually relevant to your personal context.
Another workflow that I’ve started relying on is asking Claude to identify recurring themes across highlights. You might be reading multiple books on a certain topic, and individual authors tend to take different approaches to tackle them. Claude can help you identify where the overlap lies and what the key foundations of the author’s argument are that you need to pay attention to. Put together, it gives you a set of notes that you will actually want to revisit and can take action on instead of storing just raw highlights.
Claude helps me keep track of sprawling series
Making sense of complex worlds and storylines
The other way Claude has improved my reading is by helping me find connections between books I would otherwise have missed. Most of the books I read exist within similar areas of interest, whether fiction or non-fiction. I usually read tech and productivity-related books, but also a whole lot of fiction, high fantasy, and horror.
Right now I’m going through the Wheel of Time series. Between almost a dozen books, it’s very easy to lose track of which character is up to what and where in the world. Traditionally, connecting all of that would have required a lot of note-taking and a knowledge management system of sorts, and I’m not good at either. Instead, I upload highlights from multiple books and ask Claude to compare them.
I’ll also often just give it EPUB files of the books I’m reading and ask it to help me catch up on where I am in the series, or even query it about specific characters, locations, or plot points. It helps me make more sense of convoluted high fantasy books and get a better understanding of the world-building at play.
Claude turned my highlights into something useful
My Kindle remains the primary source where I consume these books, but Claude has become the tool that helps me learn from them and connect the dots. Of course, if you’re using an Android-based ebook reader like Boox, you can just bypass the copying step altogether and share it straight to Claude.
While the process of getting your highlights and notes into Claude might differ, the end result is a workflow that helps you create better summaries, identify important themes, and compare ideas across authors and books. It can also turn old highlights into something that’s genuinely useful.
Here
“`
