Converse with your books
This is for Matt:
Write in your books; mark them up and make them yours. Books are to be read and used, not collected and coddled. Invent your own system or borrow from another, but learn to have a conversation with the book, pen in hand.
Mark your books! As you read each day, make pencil notes or marks in the margins of your book, underline important or particularly interesting bits, bracket significant sections, make brief outlines, jot exclamation marks or question marks, etc. This will not only keep your mind active and engaged with the text, which is critical, but it will also produce in you the valuable psychological affect of owning the text, its ideas, and your own increasing understanding, and it’s a delight to exercise physical ownership of the volumes beyond mere monetary purchase. You are gaining intellectual purchase on them, just as a rock climber gains purchase, grip by grip, upon the Eiger’s North Face. I’m quite serious about all this. It is not the mark of a lover of books to refuse to alter them physically – it’s the mark of a true lover of books to put his mark upon them. A lover of books alters his books by his commitment to them, and that changes him too.
Quotes from Wes Callihan‘s newsletter.
So, I’ll leave Till We Have Faces free of interpretation for you, my love, but I’m not going to stop writing in my books. :) Maybe we’ll have to start buying two copies. :)
Yes. And it makes them bloody irritating for anybody else to read, as you subtly railroad the second reader’s consciousness into your own interpretations hideously scrawled into the margins and text itself. The secondary result is that you have a book full of meaningless punctuation (exclamation marks, question marks, ellipses, etc.) and text-decoration that doesn’t mean anything to you the second time you read through it.
I think I’ll start undermining the book-defacing insurgency by writing meaningless comments in the margins of all of our books.
After I perfect my imitation of your handwriting, your scribblings shall take on even less meaning than they had before I got there! In fact, through the careful and subtle use of counterdefacement and the art of disinformation, I may actually be able to change your own interpretations of books as you read them again.
This could be fun!