/lit/ - Literature

>>11022838
I get this with Thucydides and Xenophon a lot

>and then this happened
>and then that
>which wasn't all that relevant but still
>here something else that happened.

Its easy to get distracted and daydream away

>>11022838
Some dude whose name i don't remember once said something like "i don't remember all the meals I've taken but they've made me who i am now".
That pretty much solved that issue for me.

>>11022843
I get it with modern books, I think I'm just a brainlet. I just finished The White House Years by Kissinger and hardly remember much of it. I think it's in part because he smashed in so much fucking detail

>>11022861
there's a reason why there is a difference between reading and studying. You will not master a difficult book on your first try.

Reading 'the presocratic philosophers' there is so much contradictory information about everything talked about that it's hard to say anything...

>tfw read history book
>have good memory so i remember a lot of it
>can have stimulating conversations with others based on the material ive read
>people think im super smart because i can explain all this shit i read

>>11022838
I do this a lot with history, but have a good memory of the fiction I read.

...arguably I should have studied literature instead of history.

>>11022907
Op is talking about reading though, I'm taking notes on what I'm studying.

>>11022838
Get book on something more engaging. You're only going to remember what you were most engaged in

That's why you read in short bursts. When you're reading something which is teaching you something treat it like a text book.

>>11022838
>read long history book
>forget the lesson I should've learned so as not to repeat history
>end up repeating history but worse

>>11022861
His name was John Green

>Read book
>DRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR (some spic is using a giant machine to blow tiny leaves around outside my apartment)
>Roommate is talking for fucking hours straight and just gets louder.
>Roommate yelling at and talking to the fucking dog.
>Memorylet on top of this.
GET ME OUT

make notes you nigger

>>11022838
To be frank that's not uncommon and isn't REALLY a problem unless it's for a class. Do you really need to remember every detail about Napoleon's march into Russia or if you remember a lot of the general ideas are you fine? Unless this is for a class or research project, stop worrying about it and just enjoy the book

>>11022838
Just take notes

>>11022939
I'm similar. I just retain information really well.
I have a very in depth memory and can also memorize stuff super easily.
Tests in school were always easy for me cause of my memorization skills

>read histories by herodotus
>all i can remember are the giant gold digging ants + xerxes cutting some guy in half then marching his army through the two split halves

the only reason to read history is to make sick references in your novel anyway.

>>11024452
You don't remember the story where some king made his loyal subject peep on his wife which caused his wife to confront the guy and give him a choice of killing the king and taking her and the kigndom or killing himself?

>>11024498
>>11024452
wait what? His histories are as cinematic as this?

>>11024501
Yeah.

>>11022838
Oh fuck this is me. I read a napoleon bio last year and i cant remember fucking anything about it.

>>11024558
History books like this have to be the best way to make money to be honest. Innocent, intelligible folks see the dense tome of infinite information lording over them like the paternal professor they never had, and they see the beautiful spine with the robust and inspiring painting on the cover after they pull it out...

>>11022838
It's okay! Keep trying. Part of it is that reading requires skill and to develop skill you need to practice. You could practice just reading a few pages then writing some notes. You could also read a couple pages or a chapter, then try to explain to yourself what you just read. If you can't remember a crucial detail, just go back and read it again. You'll get better if you keep at it. :)

>>11022838
Read easier books and work your way up.

>read any form of text
>barely remember any of it afterwards

Usually what I do to help retain shit, is when I'm laying in bed or driving, or sometimes I take walks, I talk to myself about whatever it is I'm reading
Characters, themes, what just happened, etc. Maybe as if I'm explaining it to someone (actually I definitely do it as if having a conversation cause I'm lonely and want to talk to someone) I find it help me retain and understand stuff better

>>11022838
Read academic essays instead, or treat the various chapters as such.

>>11024702
me too buddy

>>11022925
read W.K.C. Guthrie's 'The Greek Philosophers from Thales to Aristotle', it will help you digest your meal.

>>11022838
We need to start taking notes. I put off doing this and tell myself I'll do it later and just keep reading but then by the time I finished the book I already lost several of the important points I should have written down.

Also helps you remember if while you're reading it to go online and shitpost and argue about what you just learned. That way it gets ingrained emotionally and you remember it better.

>>11025278
>Also helps you remember if while you're reading it to go online and shitpost and argue about what you just learned. That way it gets ingrained emotionally and you remember it better.
I do this all the time.

>>11022863
It's kind of dumb, but I got out of this by positive self-encouragement and memorizing pi.

I got up to 1001 digits and it's about enough to recall most general concepts of what I read.
>Though I could be an absolute 'tard without knowing it. Quantum Leap instilled that fear in me for sure.

>>11022939
>>11024443
How do you read it, how do you categorize or recall it, how do you log it?

I can recall video of memories from >30 years ago to the day, and can more or less save a conceptual summary of anything I read, but recalling specific details seems to elude me.

>>11022838

Dude. Dude. My dude.

In whatever you read, of whatever genre, take notes, however stupid. Retention goes waaay up.

t. some notes of mine (I need to finish this)

>>11025304
Do you try to keep it aligned, like in order, collated, notated by section, chapter, page, paragraph, line?
>sorry for autism but I'd like to know

>>11025324

I often use spreadsheets for this sort of thing, a strong personal preference, but the method of annotation is a function of the work. In this example, Lautreamont has sixty seemingly disparate, unrelated "verses", but writing about the thing as I'm reading it allows me to connect it to other areas of culture (my own impressions, neither right nor wrong) and at the same time to understand the larger structure of the work rather than letting it just wash over me like a beautiful French word salad (but that's nice too).

I hit on the method of simply writing a few sentences for each chapter of whatever the work is toward the end of undergrad, and when this is practiced, it massively helps retention in my experience. A day or two ago I mentioned a history book on a /sci/ thread that I hadn't read or really touched in about a decade, but I plucked it off my shelf and sure enough. That's when I started implementing this method for the first time.

>>11022838
ur a brainlet

>>11025348
Damn, way to go anon.
Thank you.

Do you go back in to edit things, or update notes if something new clashes with something you remember writing, or would you add that conflict of concepts/understanding to the newer notes?

>>11023730
>GET ME OUT
Get yourself /out/, friend.

Your brain will not keep information it doesn't see as important. If you aren't meant to retain this genre it's because you're trying to enjoy it when you don't actually think it's important. This isn't a bad thing. it's a human thing. You can fight, but it's going to take a very specialized kind of history writing to overcome it.

>>11025362

I should add that the act of note-taking/annotation should not of course impede the reading-act, unless you're cool with that (I tend to be very plodding and methodical about whatever it is I'm doing these days, but I do some autistic non-fiction stuff and this methos of course clashes with "experiencing" fiction of course for some anons. Again, it depends on what's being read, who's reading it, and to what end).

With this, this is why I did the simple practice of "just summarize the chapter you read in 2-4 brief sentences". I'm going way granular in the example I gave (reading Lautreamont closely) but for larger non-technical digestion/first pass "a well-thought-out short paragraph per chapter" is a good rule for gaining retention of a work without diminishing returns against failure to REMEMBER the experience of reading the work by stopping too many times. Just have a page ready to go/transcribe into some computer text file of whatever kind when you're good, or else just type it up quick (so much faster). Another trick here of course is to avoid the impulse to browse internet instead.

Your notes-on-notes point is well taken. As a hobby I've been taking some shit I've worked up and putting it on wiki, and this re-writing process about an existing work obviously improves retention even more. In principle, I'm teaching some reader about what I wrote (teaching is the best thing to do to improve retention/personal comprehension). Let's just say I save a bunch of drafts, upload stuff, and when I feel like I'm done, I'm done. It's very helpful to have multiple states ready though, first passes, closer looks.

Read interconnected texts on a subject. If you're getting the same information from a slightly different source you are much more likely to remember it. Also possibly read some involved criticism for the book.

>>11022861
Lichtenberg, in The Waste Books

“I forget most of what I read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.”

>>11022861
Emerson said that

>>11022838
take notes
read it again

>read history book
>expect it to be really epic and dramatic
>it's just an economy lesson about the importance of corn or some boring shit like that

>>11026175
>not majoring in corn studies

well we can't all be patrician

>>11026175
What book? I remember seeing something interesting on corn history or history through maize or something but can't find it.

>>11026175
>Something needs to be epic or dramatic to be interesting

>>11026175
That's what you get for reading revisionism. They want to suck the life out of history to make people apathetic towards everything their ancestors fought for. I'm finding this with British history. Britons were never even Celts, that's 1700's revisionism to give the pre Saxon invasion British a new, demoralizing history. Celts were from Celtica, Gaul, modern day France. They were also Gnostics from around 50 AD and stayed this way for centuries.

If you want to know about ancient British religion read the Hermetica. 3 churches in Britain pre Saxon England sang constant hyms to God 24 hours a day taking shifts. They weren't primative cave niggers like we're told about the "celts" but were chariot masters who drove out Julius Cesar TWICE, never to try again. Not till a century later did the Romans invade and only because of corruption they landed their ships and marched all the way into the open gates of London untouched.

The Romans could never take South Wales though and after a 10 year war with the Silures they opted for treaties. Romans and British claimed descent from the Trojan race. Romans from Aeneas, Britons from Aeneas' grandson, Brutus who Britain is named after. London was originally named Troia Nova.

King Arthur was also a real king who resided in his kingdom in South Wales, Glamorgan. The Normans/French revised the names and places etc to French names and the English went further to dismiss all Welsh history as myth in order to make it illegal that a Welsh king or even prince can ever rule in Wales. Instead the "prince of wales" is an Englishmen of German blood.

British history is epic if you actually read the history of the natives and not the shallow and polically driven history of the invaders.

START WITH THIS BOOK THEN GO DEEPER

>>11026223
By they were gnostic I mean the Britons, not French.

>>11026223
Read Chapter 3 (and 4?) of Society Must be Defended. I unironically think you'd find it very interesting or something pleasant to learn by arguing against.

A lot of kids on here think that by reading the most dense, dry history, philosophy, etc., they're somehow more respectable. They're not. What you want to do is find the most accessible, easily digestible material on a given subject. Maybe it's history told in story form, or a novelization, or just reading lots of short articles. You want to immerse yourself in the subject, so that it captures your imagination and you can grasp the context of what happened.

THEN, AFTER you've immersed yourself in digestible, enjoyable books, articles, documentaries, etc. you can go on to read dense history books and academic research, so that you understand the minute details and intricacies. You will not retain any of it if you don't understand the context first.

>>11026250
>I find it difficult to read something so you guys must as well

>>11026223
I see faggots hating on shit and calling it revisionism and reductivist waaaay too often on this cabbage patch growing chatroom. Can we not just read shit that interests us, and go forth into the in-depth shit if it catches our interest?
Do we have to read retardedly long explanations of shit that only narrowly keeps us interested, rather than finding out by delving into what gets us excited?

It's pleb as shit, but I fucking love Extra Credits on YT for that very reason. They give just enough info on some shit, in a 10min vid I can listen to on the way to/from work, that I'll have something to look into during breaks and after work. Never would've been interested in history if not for their gaming channel sending me to their history side.

>>11026187
probably in that pseud’s book: guns, germs and steel

>>11026265
Yes. I have my master's in international relations from Boston University, and I'm pretty well read. At this point I can go through academic articles pretty quickly. Even the PhD's I know here would agree with what I said. I know you'd like us to think you're some sagely genius, but I really doubt you are.

>>11026281
>uruguay
(not the guy you’re replying to) What you say may be true to the degree that it helps a person retain information if he reads about a subject from various sources. However, in your place, I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that beginners can’t fully grasp and retain information of the "most dense dry history books" in one go.

>>11026281
>I find it difficult to read something so you guys must as well

>>11022838
>try to find decent books on Napoleon
> try to find decent books on Russia before the Soviet Union
Anyone wanna point me in the right direction? Google isn't helping much.

>>11026223
yikes

>>11026302
There are lots of history books that are easy to digest. But some of the most thorough and respected ones aren't, and for those, it can be really helpful to get background before you jump in.

>>11026308
Do you even know the book OP was referring to?

i really wish thucydides (or some other ancient author) explained why the triremes were of that size. How did they find a size compromise that would enable the triremes to be both very manoeuvre and fast. It seems like an optimisation (calculus) problem

>>11026316
>try to find decent books on Russia before the Soviet Union

'ere, lad.

edit: 4chan thinks the link is spam so I'll just name it. The Story of Russia by R Van Bergen written just after the end of the Russo-Japanese war of 1904.

>>11022838
Not everything you learn is going to be in the form of rote memorization recall.

If you're actively reading then you'll be making connections within and across the media you consume.

Also remember that learning in general has a lot to do with gestalt. To some extent the end game of learning is understanding that you'll never know everything and figuring out how you personally will come to terms with that.

>>11026345
Neat, thanks!

>>11026273
No.
>>11026281
And seriously get a load of this guy thinking international relations has any intellectual worth.

>>11026316
>>try to find decent books on Napoleon
If you mean biography, Napoleon A Life by Andrew Roberts is all you need. Around 1000 pages and written with new knowledge due to letters that weren't around before.

>>11026175
>Not being amazed at how seemingly mundane shit like corn prices or production can devolve into wars or revolutions
Not gonna make it.

I think hundreds of hours browsing 4chan has wired my brain for its content and made me into a brainlet.

>>11026939
>come to /lit/ to stir up people and show off your book collection
>make a habit of it and keep coming back to randomly shitpost
>end up addicted to instant attention and keep refreshing threads to see if anyone replied in between checking youtube subscriptions
>no longer find time to read my books

Also masturbating several times a day now, or night should I say as I wake up in the afternoon and stay up till around 3-4am. So much better off being alone without any social interaction.

>>11026939
stop making excuses faggot

just as your mind can be formed into the shape of a 4chan guzzling slut, through reading bookas you can shape it into a booka reading and remembering whore

>>11022861
>not remembering all meals you ate
pleb

>>11026187
Julius Caesar's commentaries

>>11022838
Of course you fucking don't. Do you remember every word spoken right after you have a conversation? Lawyers who are getting paid hundreds of dollars an hour don't even remember everything, they use extensive notes in the courtroom. Judges/juries who have as their sole job to be paying attention to what's going on in a case don't remember the details either, that's why there are court reporters. It's not an issue

>>11026316
History of Russia by Schmurlo, it's really good

>>11025075
you literally just described "thinking"

>>11026345
How'd you edit your post anon wtf. Do I have to get a 4chan gold pass for that?

>read long history book
>barely remember any of it afterwards
>if I open it to a random page every single line looks familiar, even years later
fucking brain

>>11026250
>What you want to do is find the most accessible, easily digestible material on a given subject
True. To add to this, in the case of history this is The Cartoon History of the Universe series.

You guys all underrate how important books are to study. You need to read some books more than twice. It’s why most of these charts are stupid. A truly difficult book to explicate will take you one month. Depends on what you’re reading though.

I haven’t read history in forever but you need to assign important key principles to events to remember what they are. If you can’t bring these events up when you think of the principles you havent reminded yourself of the details of the event enough. If you study the details, you’ll get the larger picture soon enough.

For example, I can tell you that the metaphysical foundation of Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers is espoused in Federalist Paper no.31 off the top of my head.

I can also tell you that Madison’s Papers mainly start at 36.

And discussing it like this is key. It helps you remember.

>>11028616
Bonjour reddit

>>11022838

Enjoy the journey and don't worry about the destination.

>>11026273
My high school AP History teacher made me read that shit
> then before the book report was due the class got cancelled

>>11027509
shut up bitch
I described active thinking. Purposefully making time to think instead of having a few random thoughts while taking a shit

>>11024702
ya... I should probably stop smoking weed every day

>>11028628
Lol? I just don’t strictly read history, okay? I read literature from all over time, so I pick up history as I go by.

I contribute to /his/ almost every day with something you guys probably didn’t know about. This /lit/ and /sci/ are favorites of mine

>>11028681
Woah dude you're like a modern day renaissance man

Do tell me more!