Gotham Diary:
How to Read
2 January 2014
Happy New Year, now from 2014!
It’s really ghastly out there on 86th Street, killingly cold and wet with coming snow. Kathleen and I ran a round of errands this morning that entailed circling the block. We sat for passport photos at what used to be the place where you took film to be developed. We mailed some calendars from the post office. We opened a joint account at a retail bank that has a coin-counting machine — you just dump them in. Then we went to lunch. At Café d’Alsace, the split-pea soup is so delicious that I’m thinking of making it again, after a hiatus of well over twenty years. If I can find a good recipe.
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Now for today’s lesson. I am going to share with you something that I learned, quite gradually, in 2013. I wish that I had been taught it in my youth, but of course that wouldn’t have been possible. In addition to an interesting book, you will need a supply of Post-It flags, or tabs, or whatever they call them, and an Evernote account. I strongly urge you to set up an Evernote account right now, even if you think that this is the only thing you’ll use it for.
As you read, use a Post-It flag to mark (temporarily) any interesting passages. You will probably overdo this at first. I have come to regard 25 flags as maximal. You’re not composing an outline of the book. Your objective is to create a record of your reading, an ephemeral thing. The passage that you mark will say more about your state of mind at the time of reading than they will about the book itself.
When you have finished reading the book, create a note at Evernote. At the top, type the author’s name and the book’s title. In the note proper, indicate the date on which you finished reading the book. Then begin copying the flagged passages into the note. (Remember to provide the page reference.) Remove the flags as you do this.
If you’ve just read a Kindle edition, you can open it on your computer and find all your highlighted passages. Type them into the note as you would extracts from a physical book. As of this writing, the “cloud” version of Kindle editions provides a page reference as well as a “location.”
If you come across a flagged or highlighted passage that no longer speaks to you (why did I flag this?), summarize it briefly and move on. If you come across several such passages, you need to have a talk with yourself.
Consider your extracts. Do they seem to capture what was interesting about the book? Now is the time to hunt for the odd remark that you didn’t flag when you read it but that came back to haunt you later.
When you shelve the book, record its location in the note. If you discard the book in any way, be sure to mention that, too.
No more marking up books, no more illegible and/or mislaid notebooks, no more lost insights. I haven’t yet learned how many times the Post-It flags can be recycled. There’s probably a lot more that I haven’t learned, but this will do for the moment.