Let books be your dining table,
And you shall be full of delights.
Let them be your mattress,
And you shall sleep restful nights. (St Ephrem the Syrian)
I love this quote – perhaps partly because I always have my head in a book and perhaps partly because, as a child, I used to sleep with two or three books under my pillow!
Roland Barthes reflects on his attitude to books and reading:
I’m not a great reader, I’m a casual reader, casual in the sense that I very quickly take the measure of my own pleasure. If a book bores me, I have the courage, or cowardice, to drop it. I’m freeing myself more and more from any superego in regards to books. So, if I read a book, it’s because I want to.
My reading schedule is not at all a regular and placid ingestion of books. Either a book bores me and I put it aside, or it excites me and I constantly want to stop reading it so that I can think about what I’ve just read – which is also reflected in the way I read for my work: I’m unable, unwilling, to sum up a book, to efface myself behind a capsule description of it on an index card, but on the contrary, I’m quite ready to pick out certain sentences, certain characteristics of the book, to ingest them as discontinuous fragments. This is obviously not good philological attitude, since it comes down to deforming the book for my own purposes. (Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, pp. 220–1)
As the years go by and the pile of books ‘you really ought to read’ grows inexorably taller, I find myself sympathizing more and more with these sentiments. And I find his assessment of his use of books in his academic work refreshingly honest.
Many years ago, I came across an interesting article by Mortimer Adler entitled ‘How to Mark a Book’, which amounts to a useful summary of the art of active reading. He suggests there are three kinds of book owner:
The first has all the standard sets and best sellers – unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp 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 dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)
I probably fall between categories two and three: I have a great many books, all of them dipped into, many of them read through, and the important ones (or at least the ones that have most influenced my own thinking) marked and scribbled in throughout (though I hope I never reduce a book to the kind of mess Adler seems so proud of).
But why is marking up a book an important part of active reading? According to Adler,
First, it keeps you awake. (And I don’t mean merely conscious; I mean 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.
He goes on to describe one way of marking books, which sounds like a slightly more complex version of my own approach. My own version of marginal notations is:
And, of course, I make any additional notes necessary to explain the marks.
One idea of Adler’s that I keep meaning to add to my system is his use of the front and back flyleaves to create a summary and personal index of the book.
Finally, Adler replies to the objection that this kind of annotation will force you to read more slowly:
It probably will. That’s one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. . . . The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you – how many you can make your own. Few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances.
In other words, writing in your books is an aid to the art of slow reading.
Recently, I found myself thinking about my tendency to read aloud. When the opportunity arises, I read aloud for enjoyment. But I also read aloud while reading the Bible, praying with a prayer book, or working on my novel. From time to time in my copy-editing days, I even found myself reading aloud when editing or proofreading.
This flies in the face of years of conditioning to believe in the superiority of silent reading. The moral superiority of silent reading is drummed into us from our schooldays onwards – the silent pupil is the good pupil; the silent reader is the good library user. Its intellectual superiority is reinforced by all those jokes about people’s lips moving. And its practical superiority is extolled by any number of books on effective studying, which equate efficient reading with fast reading and fast reading with silent reading.
Reading aloud is, of course, a slower way of reading. And, for me, that is its chief virtue. It creates a reading experience that is quite different from fast reading. It forces me to slow down sufficiently to give every bit of the text the attention it deserves. By helping me resist the temptation to skim over the text – a temptation created by too many years in academia – slow reading helps me to get more out of the text.
I find myself with a strange ally in defence of slow reading. According to Friedrich Nietzsche:
let us say it slowly . . . we are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain – perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. . . . Philology itself, perhaps, will not ‘get things done’ so hurriedly: it teaches how to read well: i.e. slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes (from the preface to Daybreak)
