One way I engage more with the books I read is to underline passages that give me pause–that seem to speak to greater questions about the human condition. After I finish a book, I then hand-write these passages into a little notebook I keep, a kind of “collection of pith.” It’s wild how many times, after I started doing this consistently, I remembered specific passages and was able to talk about them, incorporate them into my writing, or revisit them in my mind.