Reading to Remember
Dear Reader,
Sometimes, we style our reads for retention and interaction beyond what our own memories can preserve. They are reads distinct from reading for memorization. And they are our subject of exploration today.
There are three rough categories in which reading to remember can fit. There is your usual assortment of marginalia and notetaking; there is the commonplace book and its near cousins; and there is the book of books.
General Notes and Preservation
I still need to complete a full piece on marginalia, so I won’t dwell on it here. But within this category are your usual ideas of marginalia: underlining, summative notes, paraphrased renditions, personal commentary on the passage. Each of these would be written on the text you’re reading.
But marginalia, even so broadly defined, is not the only method of preservation. Often there are notecards—this is a bit old school—or notebooks or Word docs filled with material you have decided worthy of comment or further review. This and the aforementioned marginalia are frequently aligned with the goals of an academic read, though neither is limited to the academic context.
I myself have run into a slight annoyance within this category because the Society of Philosophers in America—MKE chapter—is hosting a burgeoning star in philosophy, C. Thi Nguyen. He has a new book out, Games: Agency as Art, which also happens to fall within the purview of my own research interests. What this means is that not only will I be reading to interview, but I’ll be jotting down a set of more in-depth notes for my own preservation. (Look, I’ve taught standardized testing as specific type of game for years. How could I not give a philosophy of games, gamification, and agency a careful read? Nguyen isn’t intending to write about standardized testing, not that I can tell anyway, but that doesn’t mean his insights won’t apply to my own beat.)
While reading to interview would make this more of an overview read, since I’m also reading to remember—just in case the book is applicable down the road—my read will be much slower. There will be a Word doc filled with notes to accompany the much lighter, interview-ready notebook. The difference in speed is basically that the one type of read would have been eight hours, but knowing that there’s a likelihood of my deeper engagement with the text post-read, my read will probably twenty hours instead.
Not every instance of general notes and preservation takes a person that much longer—marginalia and even lighter notes take much less. That’s the interesting thing about reading to remember: there aren’t set boundaries on duration or depth. There’s quite a bit of agency, or judgement, involved in the process.
Commonplace Books
I’ve got to be honest, I didn’t come across commonplace books until literally last year. I mean, it’s possible I came across the term before, but I either ignored it or promptly forgot it. In some ways, that’s too bad because commonplace books are kind of nifty:
A commonplace book “contains a collection of significant or well-known passages that have been copied and organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, in order to serve as a memory aid or reference for the compiler” (Harvard University Libraries). These books are traditionally handwritten and may include drawings and clippings from outside sources. Organization is as unique as the writer, but information is arranged so as to ensure accessibility.
I pulled that excerpt from the salvage of a fun essay that nearly disappeared into link rot. A commonplace book is a book that’s intended for knowledge-making, for knowledge-working. Commonplace books are places of both idiosyncrasy and craft. I came across the term in a catalogue this fall when I was trying to decide on my Christmas wishlist. That book didn’t make the list, as I couldn’t decide how deep my own interest in it went (I’d probably go for John Locke’s or Jonathan Swift’s first).
The important thing about commonplace books specifically, I think, is that there’s an organization, a way of referencing the contents. In some ways that’s not too dissimilar from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a book that I own a couple of old editions of that I picked up for a buck each. I’ve never read it, aside from a quick glance inside, but the keen difference is that a commonplace book is yours. It’s for your own knowledge-working.
I’ve long had my own variation on a commonplace book—indeed my reading comprehension app (and its massive backup file of quotations) was a form of one as well. But I have naturally gravitated towards putting together “lesser” commonplace books, if you will. I write “lesser” because most of mine over the years have never had a particular organizational pattern. They are more quote compendiums than pure commonplace books. I might investigate the commonplace book idea a bit more for myself, or perhaps I’ll stick to my own compiling habits. If I had to make recommendation to someone else, I’d certainly suggest the commonplace book’s more explicit organizational scheme: it still allows for whimsy, but seems sturdier for a lifetime of study.
A Personal Book of Books
The most painstaking yet rewarding form of reading to remember is the book of books.
This is a variation on the deep read wherein you’ve decided that the book you’re reading is worthy of its own quoting and paraphrasing into, literally, a mini book. The notes you take are beyond those of normal research. The notes you take are an extensive florilegium (more of a personal omnibus, really). And the notes you take are often not that of a single book but rather a single book of multiple books (yet not many books).
My favorite book of books is technically ongoing. I am paused near its end, as I put it aside to focus on more immediate research concerns. But my mid-sized, purple-hardcovered Moleskine is filled with three excellent and overlapping works: Trudy Govier’s Problems in Argument Analysis and Evaluation, Douglas Walton’s Interpreting Straw Man Argumentation, and Trudy Govier’s The Philosophy of Argument. That last work is the one whose final chapters remain unconsidered and untransposed. That last work is also apparently impossible to find, which is too bad considering my own secondhand edition is defaced by the marginalia of some malefactor. But this also makes my book of books all the more worthwhile. My edition is as pristine as my messy handwriting and personal selection allow.
Those three books have delightful overlap, though they are of significantly different scope and style. And they are on themes that I return to again and again, for personal consideration and also professional purposes. Thus my book of books serves for happy review—all while saving me the lugging around of three full books.
I don’t personally do the book of books too often. It’s tedious work. I reserve that much transcription for books that I consider likely to be worth the effort but don’t especially desire to re-read; and, unless it’s a smaller notebook for a single book (in which case it’s something else), the book of books requires some coordination, a selection of works likely to be in concert with one another. It’s not dissimilar from the commonplace books mentioned above, yet I still think it’s something else. The thematic organization is narrower, yet the selection of included material more expansive.
But perhaps I’ve misunderstood the capaciousness of the commonplace book’s possibility. In the meantime, I’ll continue to consider the book of books its own form of reading to remember.
So which forms of reading to remember have you employed? Any you haven’t tried but wish to someday? Or maybe all of my readers are long-time pros of the commonplace book.
Happy remembering,
Kreigh
P.S. As some of you may recall from the postscript to “The Deep Read,” I have some reservations about the human as “economic widget.” Two recent pieces do much deeper exploration of the reservations I had expressed there, including a more poetic phrasing of what I expressed, homo economicus. I suggest reading them serially. The first has a title that might be startling to some, but there’s nothing lewd in its presentation. “Sex Work and Self-Giving” is a striking read that explores only too keenly “the notion of atomistic individualism, the idea that we are free-range consumers, by nature detached and independent from any greater communal, familial, intellectual, or spiritual whole.” The piece isn’t what I really expected, and for that it was all the better.
The second, “Visiting Grandparents is Essential,” might overlook some of the conditions of its inciting event, but that isn’t especially notable or damaging. It’s the swifter read of the two, though not any less exacting. And if you’ve read those two and found something worth the pondering, try this tiny fragment from Auden.