New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do you remember what you read and how to take notes?

Ask HN: How do you remember what you read and how to take notes?
4 by Claude_Shannon | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I've been somewhat inspired by the latest discussion about internet addiction and its' effect on book reading. What are your ways of taking notes from books? As for me, I'm mostly reader of historical books. On my desk I had recently China. A History by John Keay and The Power Broker by Robert Caro. I admit I had finished neither of both, mostly due to laziness. The book on China I ended reading in around 1/3. I've got back to it yesterday and one thing hit me hard. I had forgotten almost everything besides some really obvious themes, and so I'm going from the beginning again. Enough for preface, here comes my question. How do remember what you read, and connecting with that, how do you take notes and how do you organise them? From school I remember old good method - you take a notebook and copy most of the book. Still, while I believe that method has some merit - I take notes from the famous Tanenbaum book in this way, because I am expected to know that topic really well. But that takes a lot of time and I wouldn't do that if it is not necessary. Another method I had some success with was writing a one-liner summary of a single paragraph in the book, but I've been raised to never write in books and I can't shake that off.