Writing on books
I'm reading Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow, and I find I'm very . . . well, struck by the way I'm reading it . . . and how much I need to scrawl all over it.
Before college I never wrote on books. But in college I discovered that I owned books, and didn't have to give them back, and that I needed to mark certain passages for essays, and that these marks might be interesting to me when I reread at some later date. I highlighted a lot of textbooks, but the novels I handled differently. Often it went this way: I was given a list of essay topic suggestions for whatever book we were reading. Say the topics were feminism and Marxism. So I'd read and mark, "this is a feminism part" "this is a Marxism part", and sometimes I'd underline parts I knew would be good to quote in the essay. Every once in a while I underlined writing I was impressed by and certain thoughts I felt pertained to me, which might be useful to me in living my life.
Now college is over . . . but I still do this. A few weeks ago I read Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I didn't mark up Howl's as though I was going to write an essay. I underlined some lines that were funny, sounded cool, seemed wise, or had interesting turns of phrase, but that was about it. So I don't do this with every book I read.
Sammler is something I was assigned to read in college, but didn't get around to. Maybe that's why I feel the need to treat it like I'm going to write an essay about it. Or maybe because I want to post in my LJ more, and make it a more thorough reflection of myself, I am hoping to write an essay about it. But mostly I think it's that there are some books that stimulate me emotionally/vicerally, and other books that stimulate me intellectually. It's not as though I didn't have (what I think are) stimulating intellectual thoughts about Howl; I considered male hero/romantic archetypes and Draco Malfoy and the roles of masculinity and feminity in the male hero which I hope to write about here some time soon. But I wasn't doing that thing I'm on about here, where I pick apart every single word and find every fractal triple meaning. I am doing that with Sammler.
The books I'm referring to when I say "stimulate me intellectually" are books I do not feel I would otherwise understand if I did not pick them apart. I might read Sammler as if I was reading Howl, and pick up some things I might enjoy thinking about, but I feel like I would miss the point of Sammler that way, and not get all that is offered me from it. I also think I would forget the book quite easily, because there's little to hold onto without digging deeper. Howl has a great plot and Howl himself is a loveable character. Sammler doesn't have much of a plot, and Artur Sammler himself is difficult to grasp as a character either to like or dislike.
Anyway, I spent the first 50 pages or so of Sammler writing generalizations in the margins: this part is about "mind vs. body", this part is about " humanity's need to explain everything", this part is about "time". Then the next 50 pages or so I spent trying to figure out what the author is saying about these different concepts. He's saying nothing can be explained, that the body will always force itself on the mind, that the future equals death. Then the rest of the book I spend looking for evidence of these conclusions.
Of course it's not so clean-cut as that. Half-way in I might find a concept which has really been threading through the novel all along, but that I didn't catch in the beginning--then I have to go back and find earlier parts where that concept or theme reared its head. And sometimes, especially when I'm not sure what the concept is, but I know it's something important that relates to something important that was said earlier, I go back and find the earlier passage on page 50 and then go and add "c.f. pg 50" to page 60, or wherever. Mostly I like to write "c.f." because it makes me feel that I am very clever, but it is fun to realize on pg 90 that something from pg 50 was important, and then to go to page 50 and see a note for page 13, and go to page 13 and realize what the author might really be trying to say on page 90.
But of course it makes the process of reading exhaustive. I spent two hours the other day reading about 11 pages. But if I didn't do this, I wouldn't understand it. And it's not that I need to understand what the author is trying to say; it's that I need things to make sense to me in my own head. I do this with David Lynch movies. I don't really care if some scenes are random, if some props aren't meant to be symbolic, if some lines aren't meant to mean anything. I need everything to mean something to me, or else I don't care about it and feel it's a waste of my time. So I look for meaning so that I can enjoy the art, whatever it is. But as I said, my enjoyment is very different than if I am watching The Sound of Music, or reading Howl's Moving Castle.
Anyway, I marvel at my notations. I think a part of me is impressed with myself for being so intellectual, but mostly I realize I'm ridiculous. I get so upset that I have no way of distinguishing whether a passage is underlined because it refers to something else that will help make the meaning clear, or because the writing was cool, or because I think it could personally help me in life. The other day I noted in the margin, "This is just for you, Joy!" These days I mark with an asterisk if the writing is cool and write at the bottom "writing". I usually only comment on the writing if a technique is being used that I haven't seen or made note of before that I think I could use in my own writing. Then the parts that are marked in order to make meaning clear to me usually have the relevant concepts and c.f.s written beside them, but it all gets so messy. It's like reading a novel just reading my margins.
Anyway, STOP. Poll time.
Poll
If you want, I'd love to read about how you read, what books you mark up, how you mark them up, and why you desecrate your reading material so. (Sacrilige! Besmircher and betrayor!)