I recently finished Adler's 'How to Read a Book'. Very good book and I'd recommend it to anyone who is interested in some serious analytical reading techniques. One of the first suggestions is to go heavy on the note taking. Underline, highlight and write stuff in the margins. They even suggest using the flyleaf!
This all makes some sense but I find the idea of actually marking up a book to be a near sacrilege. In my thirty some years of reading I have never written in a book guilt free. I don't bend the pages. I even feel bad when the spine on a paperback breaks. Taking notes in the actual book is a step too far.
Enter the Kindle. I've started doing the reading for the Great Books list (feel free to join in, should be fun!). To take a note you simply start typing with the key pad. It opens up a window for you to put your thought in. You can simply save this or 'save and share' and the window closes. A number appears in the text and you can move on.
Highlighting is even easier. You simply click on the text and move to the end of the thought that you want to highlight. Click again and (viola!) you've got it. As a bonus, you can see passages that lots of other people have highlighted too. This is interesting, if nothing else.
Push the menu button and you can access your notes and highlights. You can also see the most popular highlights of others. All as easy as can be.
Now I can mark up my readings!
2 comments:
It's interesting that you see it that way, as I've found the opposite to be true for me. I love to mark up a book, to make it mine, with scribbles, and underlines, etc. But, I found the Kindle note-taking feature very disappointing. I think it's because the notes don't sit side-by-side with the text, and I don't have the same flexibility to number, draw arrows, or whatever thing I think to make my point. I will say, though, that it was nice when I was reading a library book to have the ability to respond in notes, which of course, would otherwise be impossible.
Ah, but for me the idea of even making a note has always stopped me. The ability to simply do so electronically is a bit of a godsend. I get what you mean about arrows and so on. I hope that you get used to a different set up.
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