Every book you read lends you words from someone smarter. Keep the good ones.

Reading is borrowing someone’s vocabulary for a few hundred pages. Some of it stays, and what stays changes what you can notice, because a thing you have no word for is hard to hold onto. That is the quiet return on reading, separate from plot or information. You come out able to say slightly more than you could before.

Keep a running list somewhere cheap: a note on your phone, the inside cover, whatever you will actually use. Write down the words and phrasings that made you stop. Use one of them within a week and it becomes yours instead of a souvenir.