How To Read A Book

To your point about readers adding their thoughts to books: Read with a pen, or several, in different colors. And don't just carry that mark-making arsenal around to write in a notebook. Write all over every page of the book you are reading as you read it.

You are not holding a collector's item that won't exist forever for all of humanity without your heroic efforts to preserve it. Unless it's signed by an author that changed your life, you are entirely wasting your time with any self-indulgent, half-formed intentions of keeping some tome in "collector's condition" to add to your fantasy book-lined library or study or whatever. You're not impressing anyone. We have an internet. The canon will survive without you.

That book is only as good as you are able make it a part of you. It was written and printed for you to buy, enjoy and share. Show some gratitude and interact with it--write in it. Dog-ear those corners and tear those pages.

Is there a good picture? Rip it out and tape it to the wall where you can see it tomorrow. Or skip that step and put it somewhere that someone else will see it--on a parking meter, in a waiting room, on the conference table after the meeting, on a chair at the DMV, et cetera.

The more you leave your mark on that book, the more your friend (or biographer or whomever else cares to read what you read) will love it when you give it to them.

If none of the above sounds like something you would ever do with the book you are reading, immediately throw it away and get a few others.

That is all.

simple and right on. i just finished Diving Bell & The Butterfly - unbearably painful and beautiful - wanna borrow it?

That's the stuff. Yes, I would like to borrow it. We're just going to have to do lunch!