To Mart a Book
佚名 / Anonymous
You know you have to read “between the lines” to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to “write between the lines”. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love.
There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher’ s icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your bloodstream to do you any good.
There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best-sellers-unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns wood, pulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books—a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many—every one of them dogeared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. This man owns books.
Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading it? First, it keeps you awake. And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean wide awake. In the second place, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking lends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. Finally writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed.
If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can’t let your eyes glide across the jnns of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. The books you read for pleasure cad be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. If, when you’ve finished reading a book the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively.
But you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words, and sentences more sharply before your mind and protrayes them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.