Essay
Read with a pen in your hand
The page is not a screen. It can take a mark, and it remembers it.
Most of what we read slides past. We nod, turn the page, and by evening the argument has left no mark at all. The fix is old and almost embarrassingly simple: write back to the page.
A margin is a conversation. You nod along politely argue. You circle the word you will look up on the bus. You draw a line from a doubt in paragraph two to its answer six lines down, and the book becomes a map of your attention.
A book you have written in is a book you have actually read.Dorothea Venn, 1931