How to Mark a Book Wednesday, 20 August 2008
Posted by Chris in Books, Quotable.trackback
Recently I’ve increasingly been reading with pencil in hand and have started marking books. It seems to be a very helpful discipline. Dr Mortimer J. Adler explains in his brief article How to Mark a Book:
There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it … 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.
Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? 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 tends 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.
… reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author … Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn’t consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher … marking a book is literally an expression of your differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.
Mortimer J. Adler, “How To Mark a Book”, (The Saturday Review of Literature, 6th July 1941), from Roger Sherman Loomis and Donald Lemen Clark, eds., Modern English Readings, (Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1942), pp. 268 – 272, (I hope I’m not breaking copyright!)
I’ve also heard good things about Adler’s book: How To Read a Book. Any thoughts anyone? Finally then, in case it might help someone think about their own scheme here is how I’ve been developling my book marking – a pencil and margin based approach:
- Line: a good point
- Double line: a very good point
- Wiggly line: a questionable point
- Numbers/letters/Roman numerals: a sequence of points/subpoints
- Asterix: keyword/point/section
- Arrow: start of a new point/section or linking points
- Exclamation mark: surprising point
I employ a different method but this is useful as well. We should always have pen or pencil in hand when reading. Adler is excellent on this kind of stuff. Great blog, btw.
[...] How to Mark a Book [...]
I’ve been marking books for a while… I find it very useful. I found Adler’s book “How to Read…” had loads of useful stuff in, but it is quite long, and it’s worth skim reading much of it, and going back over points that are new, or that you’re not sure about.
I also found myself starting to outline/summarise the argument of books as a result of Adler’s book. Which is originally why I started my blog.
Thanks for the thoughts chaps.