Forgetting books I've read

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I'm a reader. I've read a lot of fiction books, but after finishing one, I pretty much forget the whole thing. Maybe I remember the basic plot, but everything else is just very blurry. Sometimes it's the other way around, where I remember a certain detail or scene, but the basic plot is gone.

When I talk about books with other people and they ask me if I've read (insert title) and what I think of it, I often don't know what to say, even if I have read it, because I've simply forgotten the whole thing. I just remember if I liked it or not. It also makes it difficult for me to recommend books to people, since I kind of suck at explaining what it's about, in a good way.

Is this normal? Is it an aspie thing? I find it quite annoying, cause some of the books I've read have contained great life lessons and stuff like that, but I don't really get to apply it to my life, since I forget it shortly after finishing it.

I don't know if it's an aspie thing but I'm pretty much the same.
But I like re-reading so if I like a book I read it many times, until it finally stays with me. Same goes for movies too. So as a result, I generally either memorize the whole thing or forget about it lol.

Happens to me as well.

There are some books I wish I could forget. I was assigned certain books in multiple classes I took over the years. I became so sick of them that I never looked at them again.

Phew, glad to know I'm not the only one.
Now when I think about it, conversations are actually the same pretty much. Or things I've done in the past.
Sometimes people say "do you remember when we did this, or when you said that", and I literally don't remember. However I remember every stupid or bad memory vividly. Kind of a shame really.

I remember the days when bad things happened, but not so much the days when I accomplished something, unless I look back at the certificate and see the date.

It's the same for me as well. I barely remember anything from books I've finished. Funnily enough, I can read a book, and leave it for months, and then go back to it and more or less remember most of the stuff that has happened or the characters in the book, but then I finish it and... it's gone from my memory forever. It's the same for movies, and for work-related stuff (I have to i.e. read a lot of scientific articles, and some of them I have to keep re-reading because I completely forget what they are about... sometimes I even have made plenty of notes on the margins and I cannot even recall having read it at all). I can remember if I really liked something, but not much more than that.

It really frustrates me because my memory operates in basically the same way when it comes to recalling things that have happened in my life. If I meet someone from highschool and they go "do you remember that one time that we went there and did this or that?" my brain goes blank; I cannot remember that some of those things ever happened. It's hard to explain, because there are some things (not necessarily bad ones) that I do remember, for some reason, even though they were not remarkable at all; yet, the apparently good anecdotes... nothing was retained by my brain. I also cannot recall anything at all from my life before I was about 5 or 6 years old, not sure how common this is. It makes me sad because I wish I could go through things that I have experienced in the past like other people seem to be able to do, instead of having this messy blur inside my head.

This can lead to awkward things too. Once I told my sister that I really liked her earrings, and she replied "you got them for me as a present". Oops.

I was an English Literature major in college (how's that for bucking an Aspie stereotype? ) and the things I remember are those where I can remember how it physically looked on the page, or how it sounded because I read it aloud. Everything else is pretty buried or jumbled.

I'm exactly the same. Can be movies, conversations or things I've done with people. People will ask me "do you remember when" and I'll have no idea and just pretend I did which leads to that awkward silence where they're waiting for you to follow up.

I'm pretty much the same although if I start a book that I've already read I can usually tell after the first page. I cannot remember conversations but can remember the general situation in which a conversation took place, so I guess it's specifics I have trouble with. I wonder if this is related to my aphantasia rather than AS.

I can remember certain parts of various books and conversations very well, but only the parts that I have mulled over either immediately or soon after because they seemed particularly significant. That's how memory works - by repetition strengthening connections. Every read/write cycle can also introduce changes. One bit I had often recalled from a favourite boyhood book turned out to be much better said in my memory.

I have also completely forgotten people I used to know, while remembering details of other conversations for decades.

Agatha Christie wrote dozens of mystery novels, and after a few decades, had completely forgotten whodunnit in one of her early books. She got to enjoy it like a first-time reader, although her general memory was still fine.