I don’t especially care for her books, but I was a teenager in 1967 and plenty of young people from every economic background were denouncing colonialism. Things go in cycles.

If it’s for your own reference and study, why not just create a simple table within whatever word processing program you use? You can modify it to suit your objectives.

Sometimes Elroy’s style gets to be a bit intense for me and I have to put the book down for a while but I do appreciate that he is the closest to what Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and other early mid century noir writers might have conveyed if they had been less constrained by publishing standards of the time.

I believe many memoirs, especially ones that focus on early life, get “enhanced” to push the drama or humor. When you call something a memoir, you are literally saying it’s what you recall and not what a camera would have recorded and when we look at all the research showing how malleable memory it’s apparent some dubiously true material will work it’s way in.

With all that said, I think it would be more honest to change the characters’ names and call some of the “wild childhood” memoirs autobiographical novels, but there has typically been a more robust market for memoirs.

If you’re just reading essentially the same book(s) with minor variations, you’re being mildly mentally active but if there is no challenge and nothing that makes you reframe experiences or think in general, it might be good to branch out.

Totally agree that nineteen century readers had much smaller internal libraries of remembered visual images to draw on than we typically do. I suspect that at least some of those readers had developed their abilities to take in authors’ lengthy descriptions and build robust mental pictures from them. It’s easier and maybe a better strategy for us to pull up an image from memory or with Google for “Colorado mining town” or whatever than mentally build one following an author’s description, but really digging into the description and making something out of it can be its own experience.

I recently reread ATOTC and was a bit shocked with the opening extended coach scene. Dickens generally jumped into establishing his protagonist’s personal and social situation very explicitly. The historical novel wasn’t his usual wheelhouse, so I do think a different book, like ‘David Copperfield’ would be a better way to try out the Dickens experience.