what does authors of how to mark a book by mortimer adler want you to think about
By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D.
You know you lot have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the grade of your reading. I want to persuade yous to write between the lines. Unless you do, you lot are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading.
I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is non an act of mutilation but of honey. Y'all shouldn't mark upwards a volume which isn't yours.
Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and y'all should. If you make up one's mind that I am correct about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy them. Most of the world's great books are bachelor today, in reprint editions.
In that location are two ways in which one tin can own a book. The first is the property correct you plant past paying for it, just as yous pay for apparel and piece of furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full buying comes only when you have made it a function of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a office of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the signal clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher'due south icebox to your own. Only you lot do non own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you lot consume it and become information technology into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be captivated in your blood stream to exercise you any good.
Defoliation most what information technology means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the concrete matter -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that it is possible for a human to acquire the idea, to possess the beauty, which a great volume contains, without staking his claim by pasting his bookplate inside the cover. Having a fine library doesn't prove that is owner has a listen enriched past books; it proves nothing more than than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich plenty to purchase them.
There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers -- unread, untouched. (This deluded private owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The 2d 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 solar day they were bought. (This person would probably similar to make books his own, but is restrained by a faux respect for their physical advent.) The 3rd has a few books or many -- every one of them domestic dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.)
Is it false respect, y'all may ask, to preserve intact and unblemished a beautifully printed book, an elegantly bound edition? Of grade not. I'd no more than scribble all over a first edition of 'Paradise Lost' than I'd give my baby a fix of crayons and an original Rembrandt. I wouldn't marker up a painting or a statue. Its soul, so to speak, is inseparable from its body. And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue.
But the soul of a book "tin" be separate from its body. A volume is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music. Arturo Toscanini reveres Brahms, only Toscanini's score of the One thousand small-scale Symphony is so thoroughly marked up that no one but the maestro himself can read information technology. The reason why a groovy conductor makes notations on his musical scores -- marks them upward once more and again each fourth dimension he returns to study them--is the reason why you should mark your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the manner, buy yourself a inexpensive edition and pay your respects to the author.
Why is marking upwardly a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean but witting; I mean awake.) In the second identify; reading, if it is agile, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is commonly the thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you lot remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the writer expressed. Let me develop these 3 points.
If reading is to reach anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a volume and come up up with an understanding of what y'all have read. At present an ordinary piece of calorie-free fiction, like, say, "Gone With the Wind," doesn't require the almost active kind of reading. The books yous read for pleasure tin can be read in a state of relaxation, and nada is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You lot don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the manner you lot absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have attain for them. That you cannot do while you're asleep.
If, when yous've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, y'all know that you read actively. The most famous "active" reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule of concern activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a volume and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories' on the margins. When that happens, he puts the book down. He knows he's as well tired to read, and he's just wasting time.
But, yous may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your ain hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set downwards your reaction to important words and sentences y'all accept read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions.
Fifty-fifty if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. Simply you don't accept to throw the paper away. The margins (top and bottom, and well every bit side), the terminate-papers, the very infinite between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You lot tin pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of understanding, disagreement, doubt, and enquiry. It's similar resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of existence able to pick up where you left off.
And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more than most the subject than y'all practise; naturally, you'll have the proper humility every bit yous approach him. Merely don't let anybody tell you lot that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving stop. Understanding is a ii-manner operation; learning doesn't consist in existence an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the instructor. He even has to fence with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marker a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author.
At that place are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do information technology:
- Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of of import or forceful statements.
- Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined.
- Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most of import statements in the volume. (You may want to fold the lesser comer of each folio on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you volition be able take the volume off the shelf at any fourth dimension and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.)
- Numbers in the margin: to point the sequence of points the writer makes in developing a unmarried argument.
- Numbers of other pages in the margin: to bespeak where else in the book the author made points relevant to the betoken marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may exist separated past many pages, belong together.
- Circling or highlighting of central words or phrases.
- Writing in the margin, or at the pinnacle or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and possibly answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a uncomplicated statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I apply the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author'south points in the order of their appearance.
The forepart-papers are to me the virtually of import. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I accept finished reading the volume and making my personal alphabetize on the dorsum terminate-papers, I turn to the front and attempt to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I've already washed that at the dorsum), but as an integrated structure, with a bones unity and an lodge of parts. This outline is, to me, the mensurate of my understanding of the piece of work.
If y'all're a die-difficult anti-book-mark, y'all may object that the margins, the space betwixt the lines, and the end-papers don't give you lot room enough. All right. How about using a scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the volume -- so that the edges of the sheets won't beetle? Make your index, outlines and even your notes on the pad, so insert these sheets permanently inside the front and back covers of the book.
Or, you may say that this concern of marker books is going to deadening up your reading. It probably volition. That'due south one of the reasons for doing it. Most of u.s. accept been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the power to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of skilful books, the point is not to see how many of them you lot tin get through, only rather how many can get through yous -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are improve than a thou acquaintances. If this be your aim, equally it should be, you will not be impatient if information technology takes more fourth dimension and try to read a neat book than it does a newspaper.
You may take one last objection to marker books. You tin't lend them to your friends because nobody else can read them without being distracted by your notes. Furthermore, you won't desire to lend them considering a marked copy is kind of intellectual diary, and lending it is virtually like giving your listen away.
If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You lot will lend him your car or your coat -- merely your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.
Want to know more about reading and marking books?
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Source: http://radicalacademy.org/adlermarkabook.html
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