I’m selective about which books I buy now, there’s not enough shelving. I’m careless, anyway. Once finished, I’d toss the book under the bed until no more fit and pages spilled out into the aisle. I tripped on hardbacks in the night. The dog made a den under the bed and hides mangled toys there, so that’s no longer an option. I borrow books from the library. Sometimes I pay fines. There’s no excuse for it, but it’s true. It usually happens when no renewals remain, someone else requested the text, and I’m not ready to surrender.
Though confessing to carelessness with my own books, I take great care with borrowed ones. I do not fold down page corners. I flip through the pages to remove scraps of gift wrap or newsprint bookmarking before returning a library book; most solemnly, I do not mark the text or margins. It is dismaying to open a book and find underlining, bracketing and marginalia that is not ones own. It is distracting and rude. (Another confession: Not a fan of David Foster Wallace footnoting for approximately the same reason. However, I’m intrigued to find a previous borrower’s bookmark scraps to scrutinize for hidden messages.)
I read with a pen at hand, a fidget of concentration. I keep a small spiral notebook, the size of a generous postcard, with unlined pages as a commonplace book. I record notes and copy passages into this book. Although transcription is slow, and my handwriting is careless, tracing a sentence word-by-word tattoos it to memory’s skin whether or not the point is mastered:
“We are the wind chimes, not the wind,” a poet wrote about crafting her art.
“In essay, avoid the use of personal pronouns, although the essay must be personal,” Donald Hall writes in his “Essays after Eighty.” (I contemplate this advice while still unraveling it, obviously.)
Kim K. McCrea 