Stephen King just said on CNN Money that books themselves aren't important since they're basically just a delivery system for a story. But they're much more than that: they're a canvas. I know. I've been painting on mine for years.
It started in college when I first bought books that weren't required reading. I'd already been highlighting textbook passages with yellow marker, and scrawling my name inside, so of course I wrote my name on the first page of these books, too. But I also put down the date of the purchase, the book store, a recent event, and who I was with at the time.
These scrawls sometimes proved amusingly opaque years later. Like: Great news on Wednesday. What about? Or: Argued with N. Who was N? And why were we arguing? Was it before I bought the book, after, was the book connected in some way? I've tried going back and comparing my journal at the time, but the cryptic notes don't open up their secret to me. But more often the inscription refers to a lunch with a lover or friend, and the scene opens up for me in a whole new way.
Having known for a long time that I wanted to be a writer, once I started buying books as a matter of course, anything I read was also a subject of study. I underlined passages, circled words I didn't know or wanted to use, bracketed or starred phrases worth remembering and quoting. Sometimes arrows would point to another page so I made sure I remembered a connection for later.
Great lines got the full treatment, and I'd note their pages in the front or back of the book, along with an identifying word or two, sometimes the whole phrase if it was memorable.
The more dedicated I became to writing as a career, the more the books I owned became a repository of ideas, notes, questions, descriptions of dreams inspired by the book, even short journal entries. It usually felt more immediate to keep the source of my inspiration and the idea closely connected. Some books have story titles, metaphors, character descriptions, opening lines written in the back or front -- and even in-between. More than a few have whole scenes worked out.
My books are also unexpected time capsules. I'm always running out of bookmarks, so many older books have had receipts, notes, to-do list and even letters tucked into them.
Once I started reviewing for The Detroit Free Press and other newspapers and magazines in the early 1990s, the intensity of my entrance into each book deepened. Though I wrote drafts on my pc, I usually started the review somewhere inside the book unless I wanted to pass it on to a friend or relative later. Then I'd have to restrain myself, keep pencils and pens away from the book at hand. It wasn't easy.
Biographies are a passion of mine, and whether I'm reviewing the book or not, they still seem to call out running commentary as I compare my life to the one I'm reading about. But I don't tend to write much snark no matter what the genre, because if a book pisses me off that much, I'm not likely to finish it. I do correct typos now and then. I can't resist.
Occasionally a book feels so much like a freight train car covered with graffiti that if I want to reread it, I just buy a new copy of the book. There it is, virginal, unmarked, waiting for me to dive right/write in. But I also keep the previous copy or copies because they form a small diary of my relationship to that text. I've just started reading books on my iPad, and while I enjoy the convenience and speed of downloading, I miss the physical interaction. Every book tells its own story, but the books in my library tell my stories as well.
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I show them to friends, some are aghast. My partner drew the line at underlining poetry books--so
I have to buy my own copies. And yes, some of the books are so marked up that, to read it
again, I'd want to buy a new one. This is part of the problem for me with ebooks. I have an iPad, and while I've begun to buy ebooks, I don't like not being able to write notes right on the page.
You can highlight, but it's not enough. Do other people mark up books as much as writers? Like
you, old books are repositories of grocery lists, names, phone numbers, party invitation
lists, and whatever got stuck in it before I shelved it. What will we do when everything is on a
screen? Will that day ever come?
In terms of looking up words, I love the Kindle's built in dictionary and being able to just put the cursor there. I mention this a lot and get the feeling that I'm in the minority in how much I love this feature. I would also like to be able to, with an extra click, save the words I'd looked up into a list.
I've said that if I could build a time machine, or go back, it would be to go back the houses I lived in growing up and go to the boxes of books in our various basements. Just plop down along them. Or to be able to crawl into my mother's bed and have her read to me -- although she tended to read to me whatever she was reading, which included Jaws when I was something like six or seven. :) Of course, like the character in Our Town, I'd probably just fall apart over my mother being alive and my grandmother being young and the passage of time and be utterly unable to enjoy it.
The notations. btw, aren't little. :-) As I wrote, sometimes there are whole scenes, character sketches, openings of (my) stories or books.
I haven't used the iPad's dictionary yet, but I tend not to look p words while I'm reading and save them for later. That might change with the convenience factor being different now. It's an intriguing place to be, between two technologies. no?
Is a Stephen King story still the same story whether it is in hardback, kindle, audio form? To me it wouldn't matter.
It is interesting that you have made use of books in a way that is unique to you.
I certainly bend pages and underline passages, however this doesn't alter the story itself.
You've used books to create your own personal story. Others might have used a diary.
But I don't think so. Like Lev says, books are canvasses. They're records (of where we were when we read them). Books are art, their spines a glorious melange when stacked or stood side by side.
Yes, there's magic in the text, and that can exist on a simple screen, with all the inherent advantages: speed, conservation of resources, compactness. But books aren't about efficiency, and they never were.
They're about slow hours spent going ever deeper into the lives we're reading about.