Keeping Your Place
I was wondering, as I read a long introduction to Erich Auerbach’s critical study of reality in western literature, if other people have little techniques and quirks for keeping their place when reading. Obviously, most people use bookmarks, the sensible, purpose-built tool for reliable book navigation, although some others, horror of horrors!, actually deface books by folding over the corners of their pages. My mother does this occasionally with her second-hand thrillers; my father has at several times expressed a severe distaste for the act. Personally, I can’t bring myself to damage any book, however poor its writing may be. I remember once last year, at a private view I attended, I believe for the Visual Studies course, my heart gave a lurch when I saw an artwork involving the cultivation of cress upon the partially-shredded pages of an open book. I experienced another cardiological shudder when, after reading only a few lines between the vibrant foliage, I realised the book was none other than Richard Adams’ Watership Down, doubtlessly one of the best books about talking rabbits ever written. Fortunately, my consternation was somewhat mitigated by the relative merit of the piece, which was actually rather well executed.
I digress: when I read, and often I read books with very few, very long chapters that cannot easily be finished in a single sitting, I leave off at the first end of a paragraph on the left-hand page. That way, rather than wasting valuable seconds scanning around for exactly which area across the two pages my bookmark could potentially cover, I know exactly that I shall start at the first fresh paragraph of the left-hand page. This is not always so easy with someone like Proust, whose paragraphs can often span multiple pages, even going from midway down one right-hand page all the way down to the midpoint of the next, and is not always necessary for books such as my recently-read Tom’s Midnight Garden, which has the bite-sized chapters I remember from books of my use, but otherwise stands me in good stead.
Lately, with all the critical reading I’ve been doing for my dissertation, I’ve developed more ‘advanced’ reading and place-keeping techniques. For example, I’ve found it neccessary to distinguish between pages I need to rememer for quotes, and pages I have reached during sequential reading. It would be hypocritical of me, following my earlier outburst, to sully a book with even the lightest of pencil underlinings, and since I have repeatedly forgotten to purchase post-it notes, I have taken to folding small pieces of paper over the pages I might want to reference later on. This initially led to the aforementioned problem of where across the two possibly pages I meant to keep in mind: not useful when I’m midway through making a brilliant point and I need to quickly find a supporting quote. I quickly solved this however, with the simple system of leaving more paper on the side I mean to quote from than the side I don’t, unless, I suppose, I mean to quote from both sides, in which case the paper proportions would be equal…
So is anyone else this OCD about reading, or do you all have your little quirks? Do you even just go by memory and flick through until you find your page each time? Go ahead and leave comments below.
On an unrelated note, here’s a picture of my pumpkin this year:
It sat on the window-sill of my housemate’s room until I threw it down into our concrete front yard, where it remains, waiting for someone to put it in the bin. Disappointingly, it didn’t really explode like we thought it might, perhaps becuase it was quite think and quite dry, it just sort of cracked.
Tags: dissertation, Erich Auerback, Halloween, Phillipa Pearce, Pumpkin, reading, Realism, Richard Adams, Tom's Midnight Garden, Watership Down
