Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0489: Remembering essential literature, including quotes and plots

Episode Date: January 21, 2016

Shane asks about remembering literature. Is there an easy way to retain the great stories that you’ve read so that you can remember the plots and recite quotes? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 489. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Shane asked a question about memorizing information from essential literature, particularly major plot points and quotes. So this is a great skill for cultural reasons because you can make literary references in conversations

and you can also understand when somebody else makes such a reference. And it's just really neat to be able to talk about common topics with people. I think that this is something that people are really missing a lot of the time. You know, we have popular culture where we'll have maybe a popular show come up once in a while and people are able to have conversations around that or to involve examples from these shows or movies in their conversation. But sometimes it's more interesting to have something that's been around for a long time simply for the sake of being able to reference it in a more timeless way so that your conversation is, I don't know, it's more timeless, it's more flexible, and you always have examples to pull from. And I'm not dissing pop culture at

all. I'm just saying that maybe selecting carefully the things that will stand the test of time, and particularly the things that have stood the test of time, like classic literature, are just great and perhaps reliable ways to spice up your life and to make conversation and things like that more interesting. So this is something that I'm very interested in myself. And for that reason, I have some very specific tips based on what I do myself. Now, what I'm about to describe will not only help you remember the literature that you read, but it's also going to improve your reading experience itself. It'll make the literature more enjoyable and more engaging for you to read. And it's pretty simple.

First of all, before you start to read, if you happen to know that there are a lot of characters in the book, maybe you can find this out ahead of time, go ahead and learn the names. Don't learn stuff about those characters except maybe the very basic of maybe their profession or something like that, but nothing that'll spoil the plot. But just something that you can hook onto so that when you read that name, you know which person you're talking about instead of it just being a sea of names, as often happens in, for example, Russian literature. But for that reason, they often put the names at the beginning so that you know who is who. You can just remember that list of names. That helps a whole lot. It's a little bit of front-loading that you can do to make your reading much more meaningful and enjoyable,

and you don't have to keep going back in the book and going, wait, who is this again? Next, while you read, and this is the biggest thing, pause at various points to review summaries of what you've already read. Now, these might be summaries that you're writing yourself, but I wouldn't suggest that. Instead, you could read the Wikipedia plot summary up to the point where you are, or it might just be the table of contents up to where you are. Maybe whenever you finish a chapter, if it's a book with short chapters, you read the table of contents up to the point where you are and try to recall the events that happen in those chapters. But more often what I do and recommend

is that you look at the Wikipedia summary of the plot up to the point where you are. Because the fact is that the Wikipedia plot summary is going to summarize the stuff, pretty much all the stuff that's important that you're going to need to know later in the story. Plus, I don't know, you're going to be reviewing the Wikipedia summary later anyway, as I'll describe later. And so it's just something good to get familiar with because you're obviously not going to memorize the whole book. You just want to memorize the key points, but then the book itself is enriching to read while you're doing that. The next thing is also while you're reading, you're going to be highlighting quotes that you think you might want to remember afterwards, but don't focus on

memorizing them until you've finished the book. So you're just highlighting them for now and you'll memorize them later. Maybe pick your favorites first after having finished the whole book and memorize those. But for now, just highlight them. You'll memorize them after you finish the book, and you'll use the tactics that I've described elsewhere. You can just search Google, you know, for quotes, cite masterofmemory.com, and there's plenty of stuff on the site about memorizing quotes. And then after you're done with the entire book, you're going to review that plot summary once in a while. So you'll go back to Wikipedia if that's the way you've been doing it, and you'll review that plot summary, just quickly read through it, maybe every week

at first and then every month afterwards, just to stay very familiar with the book. Now, on request, I can create a list of the literature that I think is the most valuable for conversation and for general cultural knowledge, if anyone requests it, just email me at timothy at masterofmemory.com. Meanwhile, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours. Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.