See my other comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31615147

To add to that, here's a story.

Back in Feb of 2014, I was reading the book Willpower. While reading it, I kept saying to myself "Wow! I need to note this stuff down somewhere!" It was one of the first books I started taking notes for.

Right after that, I decided to revisit Thinking, Fast and Slow (TFS), which I had read less than a year before. Lo and behold, I found that 90% of the stuff I said "Wow" to in Willpower was in that book, and I had no memory of having encountered the material. And it hadn't even been a year. What was the point of reading such a good book as TFS if I didn't retain stuff that was a clear "Wow!" to me?

I don't know if note taking is necessarily the solution - I still don't retain much unless I revisit my notes, which I almost never do. But I do know that for me, reading such books in a manner where I'm almost guaranteed to forget most of it - it's just passing time and giving me a false notion that this book is useful for me past the time of reading.

I sometimes take notes on books I read. I love having notes; usually, I forget a lot of the details within 6 months (though most of the nonfiction I read is technical learn-about-a-subject from this rather than "here's life advice," as another commenter pointed out, the latter is only useful up to a point). However, the compulsory need to have notes itself makes me read less, because I don't like doing it, so often I don't take notes. Instead I write a lot of commentary in the margins, underline things, etc, as a compromise. That way I can easily skim back through my annotations at a later date if I want to. But really, electronic notes are ideal.

i generally only write a note if im struck with some strong realization or something clicks, then ill write it down in some doc to not forget (in that case writing it down helps to keep it in my mind better... probably because there are fewer of them)

otherwise excessive note-taking just distracts from the reading experience and makes it harder for me to remember anything (its the same way for me in lectures btw)

that's exactly my point. It takes away the pleasure of reading. May be write notes once I finish book and write a summary. Not quotes but summary.