[kd5bjo]

Yes. At the moment, I’m working through Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the Rust book.

This is still a fairly new strategy for me, so I don’t yet know how many parallel threads I can keep straight at the same time— So far, it doesn’t feel like I’m anywhere near the limit.

[simbyotic]

You should definitely write something about this, seems very interesting.

[tra3]

Agreed. In particular, how do you order these? And how does it fit within spaced repetition paradigm?.. I've been struggling with reading classics. I wonder if it would help.

[kd5bjo]

This is still in the experimental phase, and I want to wait on a full writeup until it’s had sufficient time to prove itself and get the kinks worked out. I’m happy to ramble on about it here for a bit, though.

This idea was actually born to combat review starvation: I haven’t been very active at adding new cards lately, and there was a risk that my daily review count would hit 0 for long enough that I’d stop checking regularly— I needed a source for lots of interesting but low-priority cards to keep the pump primed.

The original paper on cloze deletion [1] uses them as a readability measure: Readers are given an unfamiliar text with blanks and are asked to guess the omitted words; the percentage correct is then a measure of the text’s quality rather than the reader’s knowledge.

Instead of a knowledge quiz, which is how clozes are usually treated in the SRS world, this is an automated reading comprehension test— Just the thing for capturing the intangible benefits of reading literature. In theory, as you become more familiar with the book’s style and subject matter, you should be able to pass the first review of an unseen passage most of the time.

I settled on 25 lines of text per card with one omitted word about 2/3 through the passage. Successive cards contain some duplicated lines (5) to provide a sense of continuity between the cards, which are presented in a disjoint manner.

I import each book into its own deck set to show 1 new card per day (in the order added)- I want whatever mental connections are necessary to understand the next passage to end up in long-term rather than short-term memory. The reviews give me an opportunity to spot details that seemed unimportant on a first reading but that foreshadow something that happens later.

Beyond that, it’s driven by Anki’s normal scheduling algorithm; these are subdecks of my general-review deck, so Anki will autumatically mix the new cards and reviews with any other reviews I have due.

Most of the books I’ve imported are 300-400 cards, so it’ll take about a year to work through each of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doubling the number of books I’m reading at once, which would bring the average to around 1/month.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/writing/1953-taylor.pd...

[tra3]

Interesting. Do you have an automated way of breaking books down, or are you doing it manually?

[kd5bjo]

Semi-automated: I have a hacky Python script that will break up the main text and pick the cloze words, but the other metadata on my cards has to be entered manually (Title, Author, Chapter)

I did the first one manually. In addition to being a lot of work, there were major spoiler hazards— If I wasn’t already familiar with the general shape of the plot, the process would have revealed secrets too early.

[tra3]

Are you able to share your script or your deck? Would love to experiment with that.