Interactive Reading

Not previously published. Originally written in December of 2019, with updates in 2021 and 2025. See also “My Library” and the links at the end.

“The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.” —George Steiner

Whenever I get a new book I log it in a database, where I also keep track of bibliographic data, category, price, when and where I got the book, and when and where I read it. I even keep numbered receipts (and you don’t want to know how much money I’ve spent over the decades). I realized a few years ago that, on average, I’ve acquired at least one new book every day for at least the last thirty-five years straight, more like forty. I’m now actively trying to cut down—in 2018 I acquired only 258 books, a sharp reduction from 511 the year before and numerous other years that were higher still, but the following year my numbers went back up a bit. Here’s how the numbers have been since 2017:

2017 511 books

2018 257 books

2019 337 books

2020 383 books

2021 317 books

2022 248 books

2023 371 books

2024 265 books

2025 243 books

I can’t help myself. Yes, that’s a boatload of books, and I love nearly all of them. As Ingeborg Bachmann said in Malina, “I don't take drugs, I take books.”

In case you couldn’t tell, I enjoy reading, not just acquiring, and I constantly have multiple books going—numerous books stacked by the side of the bed, bathroom books, and even one or two car books (often poetry) to read when I have to wait somewhere. But even if I’ll never read certain books, I’m glad they’re still there, a sort of comfort. The Japanese have a term for this. “Tsundoku” is the habit of acquiring books but letting them pile up and subsequently never reading them. Yet as A. Edward Newton has said, “Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity . . . we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access reassurance.” I think of Umberto Eco’s “antilibrary” of unread books. Whether my books are read or unread, I agree with Susan Sontag who said, in As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964–1980, “My library is an archive of longings.”

Well, I do read a lot of my books, but I’m surely still guilty of tsundoku. In fact, I typically read around half of the books I acquire each year, and catch up with unread books in later years (although some are reference books that I don’t expect to read). They’re mostly poetry (and thus usually a lot shorter than the typical Dostoyevsky commitment), or books about poetry, but also a fair amount of fiction and nonfiction. When I take airplane trips, I always book a window seat (see, I can’t even resist “book” as a verb) where I won’t be disturbed and look forward to choosing a good novel or two to devour. And when I read, I nearly always read with a pen in hand.

It’s usually a blue pen, and once or twice I’ve gone stir crazy when I couldn’t find a blue pen. I underline favourite passages or quotable quotes (this has helped me build my growing quotation database), mark vocabulary words I don’t know (hoping to actually learn a few of them), make observations, add an X where I disagree with the author (and say why), or a question mark if a passage isn’t clear, correct typos (I’ve helped publishers with reprints), and ask questions of myself, the author, and the text. Sometimes I write chapter summaries, for both fiction and nonfiction (especially if I might be writing a book review, but sometimes even when I’m not). And at the back of many books, I also make my own index of pet topics, such as references to E. E. Cummings (I’m a contributing editor the Cumming Society journal, Spring), haiku, attention, or cultivating a sense of wonder. I once started underlining in a book I was about to give as a wedding gift the next day—a quick look before I wrapped it sucked me in (it was about the art of relationships and cultivating togetherness). So I had to buy another copy and give it to the bride and groom later. I call this interactive reading, and for me it’s a way of taking book ownership responsibly, together with cataloguing everything, even while I probably make each book worthless to anyone else who might want the book in the future. My kids aren’t going to like inheriting my library.

Writing in books has a long tradition, of course, and marginalia, as it’s called, can be fascinating. Imagine if you could read marginalia by Lewis Carroll or Albert Einstein, by J. D. Salinger or even Hitler. Well, someday someone might enjoy reading my marginalia, and find out what I really think of this or that passage or poem, but I won’t hold my breath. Indeed, my motive for writing in my books is not just to make my reading experience richer and more responsible, but as a kind of research—and some of my notes were originally intended to be private, like diary entries, although that privacy mostly won’t matter when I’m dead. I do wonder what a few poets might think of my impatient criticisms of one or two books, or even of my gushings in response to others. This is all part of the way I enjoy my books, reaping the most benefit I can get from them. As Austin Kleon once said, “Marginalia is a way of really owning your books and your reading experience.” I would underline that claim in a book, and maybe even put a star by it. I have books such as The Delights of Reading by Otto L. Bettmann, Writing in the Margin: From Annotation to Critical Essay by Ronald Primeau, Biblioholism: The Literary Addiction by Tom Raabe, How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren, The Book on the Bookshelf by Henry Petroski, Dancing with Your Books by J. J. Gibbs, and Books by Gerald Donaldson, among others.

My notes make it possible for me to pick up almost any book I’ve read and get to the good parts more easily. For example, there’s a passage in Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance about the challenge of thinking freshly while writing, a passage I like to share sometimes with people who take my writing workshops. The book describes a teacher who had trouble motivating a student who had a short essay to write. The student thought of too broad a subject and kept failing—having nothing to say. The character in the book eventually got his student to narrow her focus to Bozeman, Montana, and then the main street of Bozeman. Still no luck—she was stumped and didn’t know what to write. And then he told her to narrow her focus even further to just one building on the main street of Bozeman. “The Opera House,” he said. “Start with the upper left-hand brick.” And then the student came in with an essay of 5,000 words when 500 was all that he required. She had become unblocked. As Pirsig says, “The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.” I have an essay about this—see “Zen and the Art of Direct Seeing.” I know where this story is in Pirsig’s book because a note I have in the back of my paperback copy says that the “Top-left brick story” starts on page 170. From the same book I note many dozens of vocabulary words such as “epideictic” (page 327, although I no longer recall what that means), and I know that I finished reading the book on 18 February 1986 in Foster City, California. No one but me would care about this, but it’s the habit of caring for yourself that lies at the heart of interactive reading.

For some reason I love to record the dates of when I read things, or the dates when I mow the lawn or when I put up or take down Christmas lights each year. My kids say I underlined way too much when I read the Harry Potter books, which they borrowed from me when they read them. Sometimes I see my old self in the notes I make, such as marking vocabulary words that I know so clearly now that I wonder why I marked them then (though sometimes I mark words when they’re used in an unusual way). For example, in Pirsig’s book, I marked “dichotomy” (page 60). Really? I didn’t know that word? Even in 1986 when I was 24 years old? But this process is part of how I paid attention not just to that particular book but to language itself, part of becoming a language professional.

But even without a professional motive, this is the sort of reading I’d do anyway. So I basically agree with George Steiner when he says, “The intellectual is, quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.” A bit pretentious of me, isn’t it? But that’s not really the point. I can’t even begin to fully appreciate a book (and know that I can also appreciate it more easily later) if I’m not reading with a pen in hand. I’ve resisted Kindles and other electronic reading devices because the notes one can make seem much more ephemeral and technology-dependent. It would be too easy for almighty Amazon to revoke one’s “rights” to a book or for the technology to evolve and poof, there go all your notes that took hours of concentration and devotion. I don’t have to find a book’s switch to turn it on. Sure, a printed book could burn up in a fire (something that keeps people up at night if they have large or unique book collections), but give me printed books any day. I want to turn each page (I even read copyright pages and indexes), feel its texture, and admire the typography, layout, and design in addition to savouring the images and ideas distilled in its words.

And so I keep reading with a pen in hand. I confess to using pencil with books that I wonder might be rare someday, or not at all with books I know to be rare—or I’ve purchased a second copy that isn’t a first edition if I’m really determined to “interact” with that particular book. So usually a blue pen is not far away. In 1985 I had a backpack of mine stolen out of my car when parked near Powell’s Bookstore in Portland, Oregon, and it had two half-read books in it (Richard Bach’s novel The Bridge Across Forever and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World). I’ve sometimes wondered what became of those books, and if my notes and underlinings were a puzzle or amusement to whoever came across them, if the books weren’t just thrown in the trash. Later I bought both of those books again and started afresh—always reading, always making notes. And speaking of The Bridge Across Forever, there’s a paragraph at the start of Chapter 46 that starts, “How our books describe us.” The very next sentence referred to the Complete Poems of E. E. Cummings. At the exact moment I read that passage, there was a loud BANG from the bookcase next to me. That very Cummings book had just fallen off the row of books on top of the bookcase and had crashed to the floor. So of course I wrote about that experience, that amazing coincidence, it the margin of my book.

Aside from the stacks of books I have by my bed, I have more stacks in my den (they’re a small minority of what I read each year) that I still need to “process” to take advantage of my endless marginalia. I can always type up favourite quotations or write an essay or three or thirty in response to an author or perhaps synthesizing his or her ideas (I am confident that I’ll never suffer from writer’s block—and even what you’re reading now grew out of a note to myself about interactive reading). Some of my notes might be cryptic to others, but these notes are always for myself—even while I try not to be cryptic, because I never know how many years will pass before I encounter or need my notes again. I also tuck things into books, such as the boarding pass for an airplane trip when I read this or that novel, a postcard from a friend who recommended that particular book, printouts of reviews I found online, a comic strip that refers to the book or an idea the book explores, or an obituary for the book’s author. Or sometimes these tuck-ins, like a grocery receipt, have nothing to do with the book but serve as little records of daily life at the time I read the book—little punctums, a word Roland Barthes promoted, and that Mark Strand said could generate “sudden, unexpected poignancy.” These are always a treat to find when I pull an old book off the shelves, just as my notes are often a treat too, a window into my past—growing out of a habit I recommend to others. It all adds up to making a rich reading life for myself, and ultimately, a richer inner life. These notes often help me in my writing, too, so perhaps they enrich other people as well.

If you’re reading these thoughts on paper rather than on a screen, I’d be honoured if you might pull out a pen (of any colour) and find a passage worthy of underlining. Thank you for reading.