My Book Notes

I used to condemn marking beautiful pages, but…Unmarked books are terrible for rereading. No way to remember what had jumped out at me, what had changed the way I looked at things. So, notes.

Notes aren’t summaries, though. They are things that appealed to me. I’ve reproduced some sentences verbatim. Some, I’ve distilled and paraphrased. Some are open questions the book provokes but doesn’t answer.

And notes don’t substitute the book itself. For me, they are a memory device to quickly revise the core of a book I loved. I’ve made it a daily habit to pick one of these notes at random and browse.