How I Read
It annoys me that I can't remember everything I read. Once, shortly after graduating high school, I tried to solve this problem by cutting out newspaper articles shortly after I read them and taping them to the walls of my bedroom, so as to keep each article's facts, figures, and quotations haunting my short-term memory until they persisted in my long-term memory. This project required cutting up each morning's paper. Unfortunately, my parents expressed an interest in reading the paper before I butchered it, so I had to wait until the evening to begin cutting that morning's paper. Within two evenings I ran out of wall-space in my bedroom, because one of those two evenings was a Sunday, and Sunday meant parsing and slicing up an entire Sunday New York Times. (The curious reader will note that newspapers are printed double-sided, so for the system to work, yes, I had to restrict my reading to the even or odd pages of each section.) To accommodate all of those Letters to the Editor, News Analyses, and Book Reviews in my room, I ran twine along the ceiling and hung up each article up with a paperclip, so it would dangle down like washing on the line. Among my immediate family, it was agreed that I had gone insane. However, my parents didn't interfere with my archival project, in part because I was about to move a thousand miles away to college, and they'd be done with me.
In college I recreated the system of retaining a copy of everything I read along the walls of my bedroom; however, I was reading books instead of newspapers, and keeping them on bookshelves instead of taped to the walls. This system, apparently, was normal, and I managed to pass as a bibliophile instead of a lunatic.
I had fast Internet access for the first time in college and began to read the news online instead of in print. I no longer read with a pencil and pair of scissors in hand, and I tended to skim articles rather than read them closely and think about them. Reading a computer screen was not particularly pleasant—something about the jagged fonts, the bluish white background, almost too white in its calculated, invisible admixture of red, green, and blue, rather than the rough industrial gray of an imperfectly printed newspaper page, or the incandescent yellow streaking across a glossy magazine when held under an American-made, tungsten-wire, 60-watt light bulb. I still prefer to read a cheap printed page; the smudges it leaves on my fingers make me feel like I am doing honest-to-God work, like I'm accomplishing something with each section that is passed from the pristine, tight-as-a-new-tent pile of news unknown—what earthquakes, murders, runs-batted-in lie within?—over to the improperly refolded pile that will, come tomorrow, become yesterday's news and go out with the recycling. To read a newspaper—to buy it with old quarters from a machine that trusts you to take only what you paid for, to pick it up from the driveway where a bleary-eyed boy saving for college left it while you slept, to relinquish the paper at a lunch counter out of some unmeasured mixture of laziness and goodwill toward man—is to participate in the material and civic life of the nation. To read well is merely to do one's duty.
But not so online. Back then, the Internet was more or less a borough of Las Vegas. Fast-blinking ads proclaimed that You May Already Be A Winner, semi-naked girls constantly diverted one's attention, the great institutions of the world were ungracefully mirrored in miniature, fortunes were being made and lost and made and lost again, and, crucially, what happened there stayed there. Who can read on The Strip?
Besides the distractions, besides the aesthetic deficiencies of the Web, it could not really be trusted. Any bozo could publish; any page could change at any time, leaving no trace of its former incarnation; any document could disappear into the ether, remembered only by the scattered links, now broken, which summarized the referenced content in a phrase or two.
In a sense the Web was a reader's nightmare. Unlike the printed page, the Web did not permit the reader to assert his intelligence with a pen and highlighter, to insert question marks into the margins or to underscore dubious claims. Detecting misinformation required more concentration than ever, but each page was full of links and flashy ads beckoning the reader on to juicier news and more bounteous bosoms.
The Web's presentation has improved a bit, with the flourishing of Wikipedia (ad-free) and Google (image-free). For my own part, still deprived of my scissors and pen, I continued to read passively, if less divertingly than before. To exercise the intellect, I might bookmark a noteworthy page: how to summarize it in a few words? How shall I categorize it? But as Google improved, I also gave up on bookmarking, since I could find a page on Google much faster than in my hierarchy of forgotten Favorites. No longer categorizing, summarizing, annotating, or highlighting, I disengaged all but my left-clicking finger in the act of reading online.
I transferred some of these passive reading habits to my reading of printed material, particularly assigned readings for classes. I think in college, as I spent more time online, I became a worse reader rather than a better one; as an upperclassman, I all but stopped taking notes as I read, and underlined much less than previously. Perhaps I had developed greater confidence in my own memory, but I think I just became lazier, much like a TV watcher who, in being trained only to listen, has forgotten how to tell a good story. Which is a shame, because I'm convinced that active reading—that is, analyzing each sentence for its meaning, each argument for its evidence—produces a deeper understanding not just of the text at hand, but of the world at large.
So I am trying to become an active reader again. I recently developed the following system:
- When I'm on a web page that I want to read, I press a special key combination, and a non-animated version opens in Preview.
- I then use the mouse to highlight text in yellow and write notes in the margin.
- I then enter in categories or keywords for the document, for example, the author's name and subjects addressed.
- I click "Save", and a copy of the document along with my notes remains on my hard drive.
I had to write a few small scripts to set up this workflow, but so far I am liking it. The full text of pages, as well as the keywords I provide, are searchable through Spotlight, so I can find things I've read quite easily, and then I can immediately see what I thought was important about the document. When I want to share an article with someone, the recipient can read my notes. I no longer worry about pages disappearing into the ether, since I keep a copy on my hard drive. Each document is generally under about 100 kilobytes, so my hard drive has room for roughly a million such documents.
Reading on a computer still feels sterile—the screen will never have the smudges and rustle of a broadsheet. But for me, reading online is no longer a desultory ramble through neon cities. For I tell myself that I am assembling a library of fragments downloaded from around the world, a personal archive of intellectual experiences. It will be infinite, but no one will see it. It costs me nothing and produces no trash. It is mine.