When that happens, he puts the book down. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls "caviar factories" on the margins. He also has the hardest schedule of business activities of any man I know. The most famous active reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. If, when you've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, "Gone with the Wind," doesn't require the most active kind of reading. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read.
If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. The marked book is usually the thought-through book. (And I don't mean merely conscious I mean wide awake.) In the second place, reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your bloodstream to do you any good. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher's icebox to your own. An illustration may make the point clear. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. There are two ways in which one can own a book. I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. I want to persuade you to "write between the lines." Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything.
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