What book(s) are worth learning by heart?

Iliad
Bible
any good poetry

I don't know how true it is by I've heard that Thomas Aquinas memorized the entire bible so I've been trying to do the same. I'm obviously nowhere near as smart as him so I've just been working on a single verse per day. I figured it would be neat to see how far I could get along.

القرآن

Which translation are you memorizing?

I think it's RVS. I use the Didache bible.

Dictionary

So far we have:
>Bible (any specific books? memorizing the section on genealogy seems a bit useless. I'm thinking, Ecclesiastes, Job, Genesis, Song of Solomon, Proverbs to start.)
>Illiad (which translation? >inb4 original greek
>U.S Constitution/Declaration of Independence
>Passages from Hamlet
>Chaucers General Prologue
>"Any good poetry"

THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

...

>I don't know how true it is by I've heard that Thomas Aquinas memorized the entire bible
Impressive but not unbelievable. Not much else to do for fun back then.

>Bible (any specific books?

For a Christian the four gospels are probably the most important. There's no need to bother with the genealogies or other annoying things in the OT like the tabernacle or Solomon's temple at all.

Apparently it was when his family was kidnapping him and holding him prisoner to discourage him from joining the Dominicans so he certainly didn't lack any free time. He is such a fascinating dude.

mnemonic techniques like the memory palace or overlaying imagery makes what youre looking to do perfectly achievable. A good place to start is 'art of memory' by frances yates, or any thing by Mary Carruthers which goes through the history of memory in the medieval ages. You gotta remember that for a long time memory was the cornerstone of the rhetorical education everyone was getting, so while memorizing scripture or long documents was still relatively difficult, it was an expected task that many people did.

>that many people did

fuck Im illiterate

Drinking, whoring and killing your enemies are perennial. Sure, if you can do all that and memorize some (perhaps relevant) Bible verses, all the more glory to you.

As a matter of fact, I picked up mnemonic techniques for an entirely different purpose (memorizing faces and speeches/presentations) and realized they could equally be used to memorize text, at least conceptually. As a proof of concept I memorized the chapters of Moby Dick and found that I could recall the plot to good detail, and sometimes even direct quotations from a particular chapter just by remembering the chapter.title.

Word-for-word memorization however requires much more effort, the only method I know of that has been effective is: hubpages.com/literature/How-To-Memorize-A-Poem

Yet, as the author of that article himself states, it is tedious and long work to commit lengthy passages to memory. I think this method combined with spaced repetition might just do the trick.

that is entirely up to you.

how are a bunch of anonymous strangers going to know what books are personally meaningful enough to you to the extent that you'd want to memorize them?

I'm the guy that you replied to.

I'm not /that/ bright but I know how to memorize, it's just a matter of me applying myself.

Here are some sets of information that I've memorized. I don't know any of it "cold" but I can do 90% of any of these on command and quickly beef back up to 100% with a refresher. I'm about to reveal my power level but they really do come in handy sometimes when watching world news.

-all 193 UN member states, their capitals, and their flags
-all 118 elements of the periodic table
-most of the world's "territories, dependencies, etc" and their capitals/largest settlements (say about a hundred different things)
-all states, provinces etc of the big three North American countries, and their capitals
-the 'provinces' of Russia, Japan, the UK (basic divisions), England (counties), France, Germany, the low countries, Australia, New Zealand, India, Brazil, China, and a couple of others maybe (haven't retained those latter as much)
-'province' level flags of Netherlands, Australia, Canada, USA.
-pointing to all of the above on a map/table as needed

No books, there are operas and plays worth learning by heart tho, for the obvious reason.

Would go for the Divine Comedy, the Iliad or some Shakespeare desu.

>Word-for-word memorization however requires much more effort, the only method I know of that has been effective is: hubpages.com/literature/How-To-Memorize-A-Poem

Thank you! I just used that method and for the first time have memorized a part of a poem. Only took about 10 or 15 minutes to get it down.

OP here. Did you use linking or method of loci for these?
Either way, pretty impressive! As stated earlier, I myself use mnemonics for remembering people's faces/names as well as personal details about them (birthdays, work, family details, favorite things etc.). I use the Dominic Method.

It's incredibly useful, takes barely any time at all (at this point its almost automatic) and I find people are very appreciative (and surprised) of you having remembered just their name, let alone all the other details.

You're welcome!

desu I realized in the course of all this that I knew like 40-50% of the information already somewhere in my brain (like, for example, hearing "lancashire" in a lyric somewhere), it was just a question of organizing it, drilling more, and connecting the words and images to regions on a map, or "actual places".

A common thing that I do during recall (that is, playing quizzes on sporcle) is to rattle off groups of 2-6 which I mentally associate. That way, I know that chunk is "done" and I don't have to worry about it any more. I then put definite numbers on each chunk (3,4,6,10..)

Another good thing to do is to connect a place to at least one real, interesting thing that I know about it. I used to forget Wiltshire all the time when doing the counties of England. But once I realized that Stonehenge is in Wiltshire, now I don't forget Wiltshire anymore.

An example of this is the "stans" of world geography. Technically there are just seven, but I like to include Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia with this group to make a group-of-ten. Then I break that group-of-ten down into five pairs (more than one way to do this) and just keep moving through the pairs until I'm done. Here's how my brain works as I rattle off this part:

Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan (The big one on the map and its runt neighbor with the straight lines. They still launch Soyuz rockets from here. Borat's country, and the smaller neighbor country that Borat mocks.)

Pakistan, Afghanistan (9/11 9/11 9/11 bin Laden 9/11)

Turkmenistan, Tajikistan (the two T's about which I know almost nothing, but now I know I've said both of them and gotten them out of the way)

Georgia, Armenia (the meme states that don't follow the Stan protocol but it's the same part of the world and I like to put them here anyway. Stalin, System of a Down, that one guy's wife in Sideways)

Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan (the really hard-to-spell meme-ones. A guy at an old job had some army t-shirt with a picture of a mission to Kyrgyzstan. Bishkek sounds like Kek. Azerbaijan is the third thing over by the caucuses).

Any good poetry desu.

Fascinating. This is a perfect of example of how chunking works: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)

The only long thing I've memorized is the Pale Fire poem. I've never recited it to anyone (of course), but it's great to go over it in my head whenever I feel like it. I almost have Waiting for Godot memorized, but that was mostly for acting, so it's hard to count it.

Also a few pages of various books hear and there. First five pages of Lolita (didn't even mean to do it), few poems here and there, most of which were written by Keats and some A.E. Housman. But they're engrained since childhood. Dad read them to me. Got lucky.

I'd say memorize some of Shakespeare's sonnets first.

*here and there... and shouldn't have used the expression twice. My b.

Since you're being nice I'll push my luck and share how I do the sovereign states of the caribbean. group-of-thirteen, 5-5-3. Five "easy" ones, five "hard" ones, and three "sorta-easy but easy to forget" ones. The chunking, as you say, makes it manageable:

Cuba-Jamaica-Haiti-Dominican Republic-Dominica (start with the big well-known islands, then throw in Dominica for an obvious reason)

Trinidad and Tobago-Antigua and Barbuda-Saint Vincent and the Grenadines-Saint Kitts and Nevis-Saint Lucia (hard ones. two "x and y" countries, three "Saints". Just have to drill them until you know the group.)

Grenada-Barbados-Bahamas (single-words. Rihanna. Tourism for Americans in Bahamas.)

When you memorized Pale Fire, did you also memorize punctuation and line breaks and all that? Or do you only memorize the words and the "feel" (i.e. the tone you would use when reciting it) of the poem?