How to Make Your Mark

One of the book blogger appreciation week discussion questions for today is whether you tend to mark your books as you read, or whether the idea of writing in books "horrifies" you. And I am slightly horrified by the question. Marking in books is the single best way to learn critical reading skills, so if you're not doing it, how are you compensating?

A writer must learn to make notes as she reads if she wants to have some ideas to consider when she finishes. If you're hesitant, start with sticky notes. Then add a pencil mark bracket or star to the side of an interesting passage, and then try to advance to pencil underlinings of key passages. Some people--and I'm one of them--never do get to the point where they can take a highlighter to a book and/or write their own words in the margins.

A lot of us had early training in not scribbling on our story books with crayons. But we're past that, now. It's like the feeling at the end of this poem by Sherman Alexie (from his volume Fire) called "How to Create an Agnostic":

Singing with my son, I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.

It was dumb luck,
But my son, in awe, thought

That I'd created the electricity.
He asked, "Dad, how'd you do that?"

Before I could answer, thunder shook the house
And set off neighborhood car alarms.

I thought that my son, always in love with me,
Might fall to his knees with adoration.

"Dad," he said. "Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?

The one that looks like a giant owl?"
O, my little disciple, my one-boy choir,

I can't do that because your father,
Your half-assed messiah, is afraid of fire.

One of the appeals of this poem, for the mother of teenagers, is remembering the days when my kids believed what I said. But once we're adults, we need to think more about the reasons we do things, lest we end up like the woman in the joke about cutting the end off the ham. (Child: Mom, why do you cut the end off the ham? Mom: Because my mother always did. Child: Why did she do it? Mom: I don't know; Mom, why do you cut the end off the ham? Grandmother: "because it wouldn't fit in my big black pot otherwise.") If it's early training that makes us reluctant to mark in our books, then we need to think about why we received that training. My parents kept only books they wanted to reread, and presumably my father didn't want to reread his copy of The Collected Plays of Jean Giraudoux complete with my markings for my high school speech club interpretive reading of two pages from The Madwoman of Chaillot.

Maybe you should think about why you keep books, too. I buy mostly books I intend to reread, and I don't think of them as decorator items or relics. I put old tickets in them as bookmarks and dog-ear the pages until I'm done with the book (and then turn the ends up again as I go through collecting the ideas I marked that way). I love my books, and I leave my mark in them.

One of the most interesting experiences I ever had as a reader was getting a rare copy of a very minor 18th-century satire from the Folger library, and finding Robert Southey's marginal notes all over it. Southey himself is a minor 19th-century poet. But all of a sudden he came alive for me. What better way to be remembered could I imagine for myself?