Building a Reading Companion for My Vault

I read a lot. Not in a flex way but more like a borderline problem. The problem is none of it sticks. I close the book, move on, and six months later I remember almost nothing. Not the ideas, not the context, barely even the thesis.

My vault lives on Syncthing now — I moved away from Obsidian Sync to cut the cost. Having my vault synced across machines without a subscription made it more viable as a daily tool.

I tried highlighting. I tried taking notes on my phone while reading. Neither worked for me. Highlights become a graveyard of yellow that I never revisit, and notes are too spontaneous to build anything coherent.

What I wanted was a companion. Someone to actually discuss what I'm reading with. Not summarize the book back at me, but pull it apart, connect it to weird stuff, make it memorable.

So I built one. It runs as a skill in my Hermes Agent setup and the enriched data gets stored in my Obsidian Vault.

What It Does

The reading companion is a skill I can trigger whenever I'm reading something that hits me as interesting, complex, or just worth sitting with. I paste a passage, and it comes back enriched across five areas:

Historical context — what was happening when this was written, who the author was influenced by, related events
Pop culture and internet references — viral moments, memes, Reddit threads, movies that tangentially connect
Books and literature — other works that echo the same ideas
Unexpected trivia — science, psychology, language, whatever weirdly relevant fact surfaced
Emotional and thematic insight — what the passage is actually about underneath the words

The goal isn't a book report. It's more like having a smart friend who makes unexpected connections and gets genuinely excited about ideas.

Integration With the Vault

This is where it clicked for me. The enriched passages go straight into ~/vault/books/<book-slug>.md. One note per book, entries appended as I read.

So instead of highlights scattered across a Kindle or margins that never talk to each other, I have a running document that traces my journey through a single book. Each entry has the passage, the context, and the date. When I finish the book, I have a map of every moment that made me stop and think.

The vault schema already had a slot for this. The reading-companion skill fills it. Here's an example from The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin:

## Passage — Chapter 9 (2025-04-13)

> "He had returned countless times to these words, analyzing each
> sentence from every angle and chewing over every word. The component
> words had been strung into a set of prayer beads, and like a pious
> monk he stroked them time and again; and unstrung them, scattered
> them, and restrung them in different orders until a layer of each
> had been worn away."

### Historical Context

The prayer bead / monk metaphor carries deep roots in Buddhist and
Hindu traditions — *japa mala* beads used for meditation have been
part of spiritual practice for thousands of years. In the Chinese
context, Buddhism, Taoism, and folk spirituality often blended
together, so a Chinese sci-fi reader would likely feel this resonance
immediately. The image of a monk mindfully repeating prayers until
the beads literally wear smooth is a real phenomenon — in some
traditions, monks are said to 磨损 (wó sǔn) their beads through
decades of devotion.

Liu himself was an engineering student in North China during the
Cultural Revolution, so the physicality of repeated labor — the way
objects get worn, transformed, made sacred through use — might
reflect a materialist worldview that nevertheless romanticizes
discipline.

### Pop Culture & Internet

The idea of "wearing down" meaning through repetition has a modern
parallel in the way certain ideas on Reddit's r/philosophy or YouTube
essay channels get analyzed until they're drained. There's also a
strong resonance with video essay culture — creators who return to the
same passages repeatedly until new meaning emerges. The passage itself
feels almost like a description of what a great video essay does to a
piece of media.

### Books & Literature

This is almost a meta-description of close reading itself. The
literary theorist Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote about the "fusion of
horizons" — the way understanding deepens through repeated dialogue
between reader and text. The prayer bead image also echoes Umberto
Eco's concept of the *open text*, which rewards repeated visits. In
a Chinese literary tradition, this mirrors the scholar's relationship
with the Confucian classics — the *Four Books* that Ming Dynasty
scholars would return to compulsively, each reading layering new
meaning.

### Unexpected Trivia

The Chinese word for "ruminate" (咀嚼, jǔjué) literally means "chew"
— as in chewing food. The passage's "chewing over every word" is
even more visceral in the original imagery. Also: in some Buddhist
monasteries, monks recount that the holes in prayer beads eventually
become polished to a mirror shine from skin oils and decades of
handling.

### Emotional / Thematic Insight

This passage is almost a thesis statement for the entire *Remembrance
of Earth's Past* trilogy — the Trisolaris series grapples with
communication across cosmic time scales, with meaning that gets worn
down, reinterpreted, and restrung by civilizations that may not even
share the same physics. The Dark Forest itself is a theory about how
civilizations communicate (or don't) — each "wearing down" the other's
signals until something alien emerges. Liu is telling you how to read
his books: like a monk, slowly, repeatedly, until meaning is absorbed
into the self.

Simple, repeatable, always in the same place.

What I'm Still Figuring Out

Whether to write my own reactions alongside the enrichment, or let the enrichment stand alone. Right now it's enrichment only — but I think the most valuable version is when I also note what the passage made me think about. Still developing that.

Also: when to stop. Some passages probably don't need enriching. I'm figuring out what "complex, deep, or interesting" actually means to me in practice.

Why I Created This

Most AI book tools either summarize chapters (which I don't need — I just read the chapter) or generate flashcards (which feels like studying, not reading). I'm not trying to memorize more or pass quizzes. I'm trying to actually engage with what I read, make it richer and weirder and more likely to stick.

What I want from this long-term: a reading log that's actually useful six months from now, connections between books I wouldn't catch on my own, and a reading experience that feels less lonely. Eventually I'd love a map of my intellectual influences across whatever I'm reading.

Not trying to replace reading. Trying to make it more like the conversations I wish I could have about every book I open.