Personally I think the most important part of reading is picking up the general idea being conveyed, not to be able to precisely recall an idea. Like a support

Personally I think the most important part of reading is picking up the general idea being conveyed, not to be able to precisely recall an idea. Like a support vector machine (SVM), I think your brain mostly retains information about model defying events. Most people won't remember what they had for a meal a month ago, because the event likely had little surprise - but you'll probably remember the meal that gave you food poisoning. For example, I've read thousands upon thousands of papers, I generally accept that I cannot recall all the information in them. What I can do on the other hand is figure out exactly what I need to search for in order to find information on a topic and the re-learning time is greatly reduced. This general acceptance of not being able to recall precise information about any given topic mostly came from my time in school as a child, where I realized the teachers were not so much teaching us topics for the real world, but giving us the framework to learn any topic.