Read to ME

As an avid reader of words, I constantly find myself marking up and dog-earing pages of whatever six or seven books I happen to be perusing at any given time. I justify the destruction unleashed upon the unsuspecting tome by saying I’ll come back to it later and want to know where the “good parts” are, as if I’m creating an outline or my own version of Sparknotes to save the painfully immense (a gross exaggeration) amount of time and effort it takes to flip through the pages one by one. When it does come time to revisit a particular volume of Ginsberg’s poetry or Kerouac’s rolling narrative prose, however, I tend to use these underlinings and annotations as starting points rather than gravity fragments that would stand in for the general skeleton of the book as a whole. Glazing over the in-betweens separating each nugget I deemed worthy of noting on my first time around leaves me with the feeling of talking on the phone with someone through a poor connection, with whole sentences and pages of the conversation lost to static and empty space on the receiver. I rob myself of the reinterpretation that happens when you read through an idea in its entirety, which often changes drastically from the particular way I synthesized it the first time. As a result, I end up reading the whole thing over again.

So why do I keep writing and folding all over the pages of every new crispy book I get? There’s the obvious advantage of thinking about the text in a critical way that wouldn’t be possible without stopping when a particular word or line gets me right there. But I think there’s something else to this habit of documenting thoughts I’m worried I’ll forget without recognizing their importance – the potential of sharing these ideas with other people. One of my favorite things to do is read out loud; popcorn was my favorite game in high school english class, and there’s just something satisfying about discovering the way a particular word rolls off the tongue, how it rolls differently off of my tongue and your tongue, and how a simple change in the inflection of a syllable can have a drastic effect on its meaning and context. Reading out loud to each other brings the act of internalizing somebody else’s thoughts into the public realm, where the words are allowed to hover around the room and do whatever it is they please, rather than simply traversing the distance from page to headspace and calling it a day and (usually) fading into the milk of the mind where it all blurs into wordsoup. Reading out loud transforms a solitary activity into a collective interaction and I think that’s important. Not that we should always read out loud, or that spending a quiet night in bed with a cup of tea and a good book is any less satisfying or useful than sharing the experience, but one without the other seems to me to take away from the beauty of someone’s mind captured in the form of a book. Don’t believe me? Read this post out loud ! To a friend! a stranger! yourself! anyone! everyone!