Why a reading habit dies at the notebook, not the book
Most attempts to read more fail before the first chapter, at the point of choosing what to write down. Here is what usually goes wrong and a simpler way to keep notes.
The habit that quietly collapses
A notebook left open beside a book looks like commitment. In practice, it is often where the whole habit breaks down. The plan is to underline good lines, then copy them into the notebook later, then maybe write a short reaction. Each step needs a different kind of energy, and the copying step in particular asks for time that a person rarely has right after reading. So the notebook fills for a week, then sits closed with a pencil resting on top of it for a month.
The usual explanation is a lack of discipline. That is rarely the real cause. The real cause is that the system has three separate tasks pretending to be one habit: marking, transcribing, and reflecting. Marking takes seconds. Transcribing takes minutes and requires the book to still be open. Reflecting requires the mind to be free of the plot, which usually is not true immediately after finishing a chapter.
What to do instead
A workable version keeps only one step at the time of reading: a single word in the margin, or a page number on the inside cover. Nothing more. The notebook then gets used at a fixed later time, once a week, for the second task only, choosing which of those flagged pages are worth a paragraph. Most will not be. That is fine. A study is not being built, a shelf of pages worth returning to is.
The ring left by a mug on a desk is a reasonable measure of how this actually goes. It means the cup sat there through more than one sitting, which is closer to how reading notes get made than any single focused evening. The habit that survives is the one with the fewest steps asked of a tired reader, not the one with the nicest notebook.
A season, not a system
Treating note taking as a light, recurring task rather than a daily discipline tends to outlast January. The books worth marking this way are usually the ones dense enough to reward a second pass, essay collections and psychology reading in particular, rather than plot driven novels read in one sitting.