[haertig]

Does anyone have any strategies for refreshing your mind on earlier books in a series? Something you read a few years ago and have forgotten characters, plots points, etc.? I don't particularly want to go back and reread all the older books.

Does Amazon's X-Ray give you a summary of characters and how they fit into a story? I am in the habit of putting all my Amazon purchases into Calibre and then side-loading them to my Kindle, which nukes X-Ray. So I don't know what it's capabilities are. Usually a Kindle search of a character name in the current book is all I need to prod my mind to remember something, but that doesn't work across previous books in the series. (Possibly you could search every book resident on your Kindle - I don't know - but that would seem to be very cumbersome.) Plus, many of the books I read come from the library, so I no longer have them. And library books don't support X-Ray (that I know of).

In my specific case today, I am trying to read Dust by Hugh Howey. It's been maybe 2 years since I read the previous book in the series, Shift, and a year or two before that since I read the first, Wool. My mind does not retain the details of a book for that long. You can find plot summaries for some books online (we used to call them Cliff Notes when I was a kid), but they are apparently quite detailed and paid. Might as well just re-read the book instead. I just need a very high level short overview that mentions major character names in context. Does anyone know of a source for this kind of information?

Thanks in advance.