How to remember everything in a book?

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When you read a history book how do you make sure to remember every important name, date and event? Do you have a good memory or do you write stuff down? I don't have the awesome autistic memory and I'm about to read a book on the French Revolution, and I want to remember everything about it.

I'm thinking about just having an exercise book with me and writing down each important name (with a little bit about them), date and summary of each event as it happens.

Thoughts?

The best way, in my opinion, is to read slowly. When you get distracted or when your eyes start glossing over the text, book mark where you were. Take a break, and get back to reading it when you can focus more. Also, think about the contents and how they relate to each other. If there is a word that you don't know, look it up or derive the meaning from context while reading, but don't allow words to remain unknown otherwise it will aid in the formation of memory gaps.

As a joke back in grad school, sometimes I'd get really bored and start writing my notes in haiku format:

Funny, it seemed to help a lot with binge-and-purge style memorization the day before an exam.
Guess it forced me to think about the words a bit and mentally relate with them.

I'd usually forget everything by a week-or-two afterwards, though.


Also, since you're reading a book on the French Revolution -- you may want do a bit of online browsing and discover some of the artwork created during that era which depicts those locations and the social/political figures -- may help in connecting some "visual" historical context to your readings.

When I was still a Bio major, I took a class where the professor required us to do outlines of every chapter he taught from the textbook. The chapters were massive and contained lots of details, and I was too disorganized to do any of the outlines. However, I managed to memorize all the details and he gave me an A for the class.

How I did it was, I'd re-read each chapter several times. The first time I'd just sort of casually read over it, and if I had trouble with a paragraph or a section I'd make note of it. For the successive times, I'd take extra care on the difficult sections, and high light the worst bits. After a while, I'd form a mental map or "tangle" of the chapter, based on the linear structure of the book.

When I sat down to do one of the essay exams, I'd fly through it because I had this long, linear map of the concepts from the chapter, one idea leading to another and some branching off into several concepts. I had more of a spatial than a verbal sense of the chapters, it was like untangling a rope or running through a maze. Perhaps you can use this spatial idea and draw a tree diagram of facts from the book, or visualize yourself going through a maze of facts.

Read slowly and write a brief summary (3-4 lines) of every page/topic.

Flashcards.

quiz yourself.

Make stupid memory associations (usually embarrassing ones work best.

If it is history or something I try to look up possible hauntings related to it. That is how I make history more fun for myself, I love a good scare every now and then.

That's different EbonWinter. What a cool thing to do. Everyone has great ideas to help in remembering the important stuff. While I was at college and uni, I would take notes in black marker on index cards, arrange them in order and then tack them up on a space in my home where I would conveniently look at them several times a day. I would also take lots of notes in a composition notebook. To use else where for studying.

Take notes and then quiz yourself.

I'm also not great with memorizing and I also have ADHD which makes it hard for me to focus.