Thanks for your input, Chalee. As simple as it sounds, insomnia has actually been a major problem lately...*sigh*
Do talk to your doctor about that, and also work on getting exercise--which I know is really hard to fit in sometimes! The thing is, it can make an enormous difference not only in your sleep, but in cognition.
The other thing I'm going to suggest is incredibly old-fashioned, but it worked for me, and has worked for a lot of my friends and students (and I'm terrible at names, including those of important scholars in my field.) Make notecards for yourself--one for each book or article. Put the citation at the top, and a
few bullet points outlining the most important arguments below. Carry them with you pretty much all the time, and when you have a moment, pull them out and spend time thinking about the ways in which they "talk" to one another. Sort them into different piles as you think of various categories within your field that these scholars address. You don't mention your field, so I can't suggest any specific ideas for categories, but you might try checking with other students in your program to get some ideas about the kinds of questions that have turned up on comps in the past.
You won't, of course, get the same questions--or even similar ones--but the experience of thinking about how you would pull together various types of answers using ideas from among the scholars on your notecards will be helpful. The thing is, it's not just the raw information that you're trying to cultivate; it's the habit of thinking about questions in this way. Also, cognitively speaking, the more connections you develop among the various theorists, the better able you will be to remember them.
I suggest notecards because they're so very portable, and tangible. I suppose something like this might be possible with an iPad also, if you take it everywhere with you--although I'm not sure one could as easily access, shuffle through and sort a bunch of records.
