This is interesting. I took the opposite path. I used to remember page numbers while reading books, just so I could come back without getting lost. That habit started in the School library. These days, I bought a simple, cheap, paintable bookmark, about 100 of them, which my daughters can paint. I have them lying around in books, as I tend to read multiple books at a time. My daughters keep painting them with whatever they want, from anime to their favorite characters, to just about anything. So, bookmarks for me everywhere. Sometimes, I tend to go back a few pages just to recollect the books I was reading a while ago.

Based on the title I thought this was a personal call-out to me and others like me who obsessively bookmark/save links and yet seldom even glance at their collection.

Very nice piece of text. For me it’s the fact that the book is always there and no amount of pages can be too much for me to gather something from rereading a part of the book that leads to where I left off. In a way I think we’re also past the point of bookmarking anything in our lives. Culture after all is just the reinforcement of the same idea.

I can generally re-find my place in books, but years ago I acquired a stack of orange punch cards from a university library that they were giving away as scrap paper. These make great bookmarks and also interesting historical conversation pieces if someone notices/recognizes them.

I think the previous use for the punchards to have one for each book and scan them on checkout/checkin (maybe this predated barcodes?)

This is what I used to do and then life gotten complicated.

ADHD fish memory doesn't help either.

This gets a little more fun if you enjoy falling asleep to audiobooks

I don't use phones, so if I have to go somewhere, I have to memorise the route. I enjoy the exercise. I look up the directions on my laptop, mentally rehearse the points of interest that will indicate to me where I need to take particular turns, and then have to put into practice my memory with the actual physical landscape I tour as I follow this route. Sometimes I make mistakes, but correcting them is part of the exercise.

It seems very few people nowadays know how to follow a route, especially an unfamiliar one, without being tethered to their GPS.