Documentation drives recollection
Let me start with this:
You should probably stop reading. I mean reading in the sense that you treat reading as a passive activity, not as an act of agency. You treat the book, article or piece of text as a trip, you're just going through that trip with no particular thought or goal. Sure, you might think a little bit about a paragraph or another, but what sticks with you in the end is the overall message of the book, not the process of reading.
Imagine you are taking the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto through the Hikari line. You'll see some nice views, maybe chat with a friend on your phone, maybe you'll think:
"Wow, these views are very beautiful!"
However, this act in itself is not inspiring; it won't bring you to a higher understanding of Japanese architecture, how the weather actively affects the scenery or how the vegetation might be different from other places you know. What sticks with you is the beautiful scenery, not everything else. Of course! You didn't take your time to analyze it, rather, you didn't think it was important.
Analysis becomes understanding
Reading a book is obviously not exactly the same as taking a train, but I feel the similarities are pretty clear. If you'd analyzed and thought about the scenery more, maybe took a picture or even recorded a video, that'd improve your understanding of the beautiful places you've seen, even more so if you look at the pictures again.
Documentation drives recollection. You can't recollect without documenting, or should I say you can't efficiently recollect without it. You definitely won't forget a life changing trip, but you'll forget the small things, you'll end up not remembering a place you went, the name of a restaurant you liked, the name of a show you watched around that time. It's very hard to efficiently remember those things if they aren't documented beforehand.
I take less pictures than I want to and been trying to build a habit of documenting my life better. I had always done this from a young age, but I stopped my habit of logging my life because of self image issues and overall being ostracized and bullied because of my Youtube channel I had as a kid (online and IRL), which brought me some fair share of mental issues I'd rather not talk about here. Basically, I became afraid of writing, taking pictures or recording videos even just for myself.
Point is, I'm bad at documenting, and this doesn't only account for a trip I made or some good food I've eaten and can't remember where, it also directly affects my learning process.
My stance on documenting life was the same stance I had on documenting my studies. I pretty much was afraid of doing that because of a mental block I "bestowed" upon myself. Then I told myself a story.
What if I stop being afraid of writing and just document stuff? What if I started taking pictures again? What if I can change into someone who does that?
All of these thoughts popped into my head a while ago, and I'm more than happy. Documenting my learning process even for very simple things, just writing about it in Obsidian and building a simple system for documenting what I learned, what might change in my life after reading it, what points I agree with and disagree with, and also the conclusion: Was it worth it? What did I get from it?
I noticed my memory getting better for the things I read, and felt like I could actively understand concepts by hammering them in my head over and over and writing about it, then revisiting it before starting the next chapter. I don't think this is what people usually talk about when they say they're reading a book. Reading is not a passive activity, just like talking! you're actively thinking about what you hear and trying to document what is being spoken in your head, it's what we call memory!
But memory is unreliable and can't always act like a latch (besides for trauma or very intense learning methods). Let's trust latches, whether that's in form of a computer or pen and paper.
So you should probably stop just reading. Write about it, document it, think about it.
I promise you'll have fun!