Hi, Daras
Forty days for 450 pages is more than enough time for you to learn this book really well. I have no idea what such competition would be about, but I’ll suggest to you what I do in general to memorize books, especially history books. I am assuming yours is a biography, which usually is laid out in chronological order just like most history books; this helps in the way I do things.
You could do it in two broad ways: (i) following the natural subdivisions of the book, or (ii) establishing your own divisions based on the salient events/themes you find in the book. Both have pros and cons. Sometimes, the author gives titles for chapters and sections that are self-explanatory but many times they will give beautiful and witty titles that don’t help the reader at all, at least not until he finishes the chapter/section. Sometimes, the author uses few chapters and no sub-divisions at all which also doesn’t help the reader. That said, if your book has nice self-explanatory section-headings and small (on average) sub-sections (I’d consider as “small” sub-sections up to around 10 pages), I’d go for the first method, otherwise I usually go for the second. Since the second method is a bit harder, that’s the one I’ll briefly explain (after that, the first method becomes self-evident).
I suggest you do the following:
- The first time you pick up the book, take a good look at the Table of Contents and then leaf through the book to actually see the headings in place and gain a notion of the sizes of the chapters and/or subsections (if any). Get a feel for the kind of book you are about to read. Read a whole paragraph here and there, random sampling from the Introduction to the very end. This shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. MNEMONIC TIP #1: If you can, establish very simple mental images to represent each chapter. Even if the headings are not meaningful, try to come up with an image that reminds you of the title, even if just the sound of it -- you'll improve upon that later.
- Now, read the introduction carefully. Your objective here is to know what to expect from the book. But when I say "carefully" I don't mean in a thorough analytical way; just read non-stop and make quick marks. I usually circle names, places, and dates, and I draw vertical lines in the margins covering the entire extent of portions I deem central to what is being said. When the passage is some kind of historical quotation I like I also add a "Q" beside the line; if it is an interesting remark from the author I add an "A"; if it is a nice metaphor or a mention of a very visual object or situation I add an "M" to remind me this passage might assist me in creating mental images at a later step; if it is a truly central passage, I add a star; if it's something I didn't fully understand I add an interrogation mark. I always apply this highlighting procedure while reading the Introduction and from step 5 onwards.
- What I like to do now is to leave the book aside for a while and go to Wikipedia (not before getting me another cup of coffee; in fact, I forgot to say: you are going to "read" the entire book on the first day, so make sure you are very awake and mentally active before you begin this, but don't worry because apart from the Introduction -- which will take you how long it takes -- you won't need much more than an hour to do so; In any case, try to leave more time for this first day of reading). On Wikipedia, find your subject and take a quick look there too, pretty much skimming the whole thing just like you did with the book as soon as you got it. The benefit here is that Wikipedia is usually much more objective than any book, so you'll get lots of facts really quickly. Some of them will remind you of what you already gleaned from the book; others will stay floating in your mind until you see them again while reading the book, when they will help you understand/remember what you read. Take a look at your interrogation marks (if any) and try to solve them on Wikipedia, even if partly. If anything calls your attention, delve into it for a short while. Don't take more than 10-15 minutes there, in total.
- Now, you'll do something that I don't expect to be either easy or pleasant, but it will be really useful. You need to establish at least a first level of subdivisions to your book (remember, this is in the case it doesn't have them yet). This is mentally taxing, so you should tackle each chapter at a time, possibly spreading your sessions throughout your day. You are aiming here to "process" the entire book in, say, 1 hour. Assuming your Intro has around 50 pages (historical books usually have long Intros) that would mean processing less than 7 pages a minute, which in turn mean you WON'T BE READING the book at this stage. You have one sole objective: to identify the broad subject of the current portion of the chapter you are at. By "portion" I mean several pages, not one or two paragraphs. You want to create the subdivisions the author "should" have created, not apply keywords for each chapter as if you were transcribing an interview using Qualitative Data Analysis techniques. So, you'll skim the pages any way you like (I have suggestions but I'll leave them for another time if there is interest lest you'll have to apply reading techniques just to get through this huge post) until you can establish at least one word that represents that portion you are skimming. You'll keep reassessing what you are skimming until that one word changes in your mind (Oh, it was about his "birth", now it is about him as a "child", and so on). As soon as it changes, you write it down in the book at the appropriate position. Note that it won't be the exact position the subject actually changed; there was probably a lag until you were able to grasp that the subject had changed in the first place. That's totally normal and fine. You will improve on that later. All you want are broad, vague divisions within the chapter. If you can manage to do that for the entire book on the first day, this will not only give you a great beginning grasp of what the individual portions of the book are about (and the book as a whole), but it will also provide you with the means to later create a mental hierarchical representation of the book -- which I think is very conducive to mnemonic memorization, in case you want to go that far. But even if you don't go the "mnemonic way", this will create some kind of mental representation of the structure of the book, upon which you will be constantly improving as you progress with your reading. Now, you can call it a day with the certainty that the worst has passed, and that you know what you are up against. You should congratulate yourself at this stage. MNEMONIC TIP #2: You might note down at least some of the words you came up with (possibly those of the first chapter) on a separate strip of paper and try to conjure images that might represent them during your day. This is something fun to try to do when you don't have to do it fast while reading. Your knowledge of that sub-section is still very limited, but just as you did with the chapters on step 1 this images will help you establish a mnemonic representation of the entire book.
- The next day, you go chapter by chapter until your 1-2 available hours end. Your main intention is to improve those subdivisions you created, possibly extending your one-word descriptions to something more meaningful and correspondent to your newly gained understanding. While reading each sub-section, do the same thing you did in the previous step: try to assess what are you reading about at each point, and as soon as the theme changes (this is within the given sub-section) try to come up with at least a one-word summary and write it down in the book. Now, you may be able to define better limits to each section; your new short description functioning now as a sort of no-nonsense title for that section. MNEMONIC TIP #3: Take note of those descriptions on a separate sheet of paper and try to turn them into visual and impressive scenes, full of action and vibrant colors/sounds/smells. You already had a simple image for each sub-heading, so now try to use all the mnemonic tenets you know of to make it a memorable scene (that assuming your understanding hasn't completely changed and made that previous image useless, in which case don't hesitate in completely ditching it). When you finish processing the chapter this way, use the much deeper knowledge you now have to improve on the description (and image) for the chapter as a whole, the one you had come up with at step 1 above. Leave the next chapter for the next day.
- Then, you keep repeating the same procedure until the end of the book. Let's say the book has 10 chapters and you did all the above in 11 days. You still have plenty of time. So, now, you can tackle each sub-division individually and repeat the process: (i) while reading, try to come up with new sub-divisions and assign one-word descriptions; (ii) improve on the descriptions one level up; (iii) improve the corresponding mnemonic images. Then you can choose if you go all the way to the end of the book first on that same level of detail, or if you keep going "down" into more detail on each chapter first until you are satisfied. I like the first approach better because it embodies the philosophy of the system by always striving for a general understanding of the whole book first and only then trying to improve on that.
As far as mnemonics go, coming up with images is not always easy, and linking them in a way that they are easily retrievable is even harder. I get away without using memory palaces, because I find them clumsy and not easily scalable (in spite of them being the most efficacious way of remembering – efficacious, not efficient), by linking the entire hierarchical structure resultant from the above process. But that’s another story for later because this post is ridiculously long as is.
I hope this may be of any help to you.
Best,
M.