Build a connected reading workflow

Track every book you read with its author, rating, and your notes, keep the articles you clip alongside it, and then pull up “every five-star audiobook” or “everything I still have to read” with one query.

In short

Give books their own Book Type, keep articles as Weblinks, gather a reading list in a Collection, and link your notes to the people, projects, and ideas they affect.

What you will build

By the end you will have:

• a Book Object Type with author, rating, and medium;
• a reading template for your notes;
• a Reading next Collection;
• articles saved as Weblinks, with readable copies and highlights imported from Readwise or Kindle;
• queries that find your best books and your unread ones.

1. Add the Book Object Type

1. In the sidebar, choose + next to Object types to open the Add new object type gallery.
2. Under Templates, choose Book.
3. Review the schema, then choose Create object type →.

The preset gives each Book:

Property	Kind	Values
title, description	Text
author	Text
rating	Select	★ to ★★★★★, stored as 1 to 5
recommendedBy	Text
medium	Select	Paper, E-book, Audiobook

It also has tags, a Notes body, and a Cover image relation.

Treat the preset as a starting point. Add a property, such as a status or a finished-on date, only if you will fill it in for every Book; use tags or a Collection for looser groupings. See Create and edit an Object Type and Properties.

2. Create a reading template

1. Create a Book and give its body this structure:

   ## Why I am reading this
   
   ## Main argument
   
   ## Notes and highlights
   
   ## Questions
   
   ## Connections
   
   ## What changes after reading it

2. Open the Book’s ⋯ menu and choose Save as template.

3. To start every new Book this way, open Object type settings → Templates and mark it as the default.

Keep the template light: it should prompt thinking, not turn reading into form-filling. See Templates.

3. Build a reading list

1. Open the Book Type’s menu in the sidebar and choose New collection.
2. Name it, for example Reading next or Course reading.
3. Add Books to it by hand.

Use a Collection when the choice to include a Book is itself the decision you want to keep. Removing a Book from a Collection does not delete it. When membership should follow from properties instead, such as “every Book with no rating yet”, save a query (step 7). See Collections.

4. Capture articles and web sources

Use Quick capture to save a URL, or send it from the browser extension or another capture channel. It lands in Captures, where you decide what it becomes.

For a source worth keeping:

1. Open the Capture and Convert it to a Weblink.
2. On the Weblink, choose Fetch article to save a readable, searchable copy of the page.
3. Add tags.
4. Link it from the relevant Book, Project, or Idea.

Fetch article appears only after you turn on Allow network-capable blocks in Settings → Editor, because fetching contacts the article’s site. It is off by default.

The Weblink keeps its own notes, preview, and backlinks. See Quick Capture, Process your Captures, and Files and media.

5. Import highlights you already have

Open Settings → Integrations and look under Reading & highlights:

• Readwise syncs your highlights with an access token. Each source becomes one Weblink with its highlights in the body. Sync is one-way: edits in Lar are never written back to Readwise.
• Kindle imports the My Clippings.txt file from your device, one Weblink per book. The file never leaves your device.

For Readwise, choose Test before you sync. Imported highlights become ordinary local Objects you can tag, link, and edit.

An imported Weblink does not create a Book. When you want both the bibliographic record and the highlights, link the Weblink from your Book.

6. Take connected notes

While reading:

• write your own synthesis in the Book body;
• link existing Ideas, People, Projects, Definitions, and Quotes with [[wikilinks]];
• use ![[transclusion]] to show another Object inline;
• use ((block references)) to point at one passage;
• add a small, consistent set of tags.

Give an idea its own Idea, Quote, or Definition Object when it deserves its own identity and backlinks; each is a shipped preset in the same gallery. Leave observations that only make sense in context as blocks in the Book. See Links and transclusion and Tags.

7. Rediscover what you read

Type these TQL queries into the search field in the app header:

Query	Finds
type:Book prop.rating:5	Every five-star Book
type:Book prop.rating:5 prop.medium:audiobook	Five-star audiobooks
type:Book !prop.rating:*	Books you have not rated yet, a handy “still to read” list
type:Weblink prop.category:article tag:strategy	Articles tagged strategy
type:Book tag:leadership order:title	Leadership books, A to Z

Choose ★ save beside the field to keep a query you use often.

Other ways back in:

• Search a title, author, alias, or phrase from your notes.
• Open a Book’s backlinks to see every note that cites it.
• Open Related Content for Objects that share tags or links with it; with semantic search enabled, similar meaning counts too.
• Open Graph to follow connections across Books, People, Projects, and Ideas.
• Switch the Book Type’s layout, for example to Gallery to browse by cover or Table to compare ratings.

See Graph and related content and Layouts and Saved Views.

8. Schedule a revisit

To come back to a Book at a specific time, open its ⋯ menu and choose Set reminder…. The reminder appears in Upcoming and fires as a notification.

Use a reminder when timing matters and a Collection when you want a queue with no deadline. See Reminders and notifications.

Next: Run meetings from connected notes.