My memory is terrible, it always has been, and when I say terrible I mean it's capricious and unreliable to a degree that might be unusual, selectively awful or good with no pattern or reason, or maybe there is a pattern or reason but I forgot what it was. I remember plenty of the ancient past but not the right things. This is probably fairly common to some degree, but it's hard to tell because people like to engage in strategic exaggeration in this area, it can be personally useful to deny certain memories and make extravagant claims regarding others. I don't think I'm absent-minded to the point of eccentricity. (My eccentricities are in other areas.) I remember shockingly little about close friends I had, but I remember long stretches of dialogue from bad TV shows; important personal events are almost completely forgotten, embarrassingly, but I can recall minute details of seemingly banal occurrences, like a certain uneventful trip to the supermarket, one among thousands, or riding in the car when a certain song was playing. I read books and forget them, information doesn't stick, but I remember the pleasurable feeling of reading them, so later I say "I really enjoyed that book" but I couldn't tell you why so don't ask. On a second reading it gets much better, but with so many books to be read who can read everything twice? It isn't like I race through them, in fact I'm something of a plodding reader. I should probably record my thoughts about the books I read, notes for myself if nothing else. It's getting to the point where I'll start a book and only belatedly realize I read it years ago.