Books Before Breakfast

Sometimes when the house is very quiet I can sneak in a few hours of reading early in the morning. I'm sharper after a night's sleep, not dropping off on every page, and what I run my eyes over stays with me longer.

What stays and what doesn't is the subject of the book I just finished, Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer. It's a book about memory and memorizing, how a journalist covering the U.S. Memory Championship spent a year developing his memory — and became the U.S. Memory Champion himself.

Basically, anyone can improve his or her memory, Foer says. Or anyone with reasonable intelligence willing to spend hours a day practicing. The mnemonic techniques Foer uses were well known hundreds of years ago, before printed books made memorizing less important.

In my favorite chapter, "The End of Remembering," Foer provides an intellectual history of memory's steady assault by scroll, codex, silent reading, indexes, the printing press — and more recently by computers, cell phones, Google and Post-It notes. Why bother to hold information in our heads when there are so many other places to put it?

"Our memories make us who we are," Foer writes. "They are the seat of our values and source of our character. ... Memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human."

I couldn't agree more. But just to be sure, I will now write "Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein" in the back of my journal. It's where I inscribe the names of all the books I read. If I didn't, I'd forget I had read them.