All About the Art of Book Marking - Essay Example

The habit of reading & discovering undoubtedly survives as one of the most ethereal experiences achieved on this planet.

An aggrandized comportment of reading & deciphering a book involves a precise process. It involves reading, concentrating, loving & ultimately marking. Of these ‘marking’ has been the issue that has been repeatedly cultivated. Marking has been an age-old tradition for indigenous book addicts, & they have been the greatest champions of this approach. But is marking really effective in reality as its propagators quote it to be? This answer requires a few notions to discourse.

First, let’s be clear; marking books is necessary but not obligatory. A reader who is enjoying a book from a spiritual plane may not require marking a book as he automatically gets involved with the metaphysical components of the book. Here a fundamental perception must be clarified. Marking a book is nothing more than an intellectual phenomenon. A person who does not possess the heart & soul of concentrating in the labyrinth of the pages can never attain his goal solely resting on the process of marking. The entire process of marking is of a cliché orientation. It encourages a person to scribble & squander the beauty of the mother article thereby destroying its tranquility. Yes, marking is a necessary aspect of reading. But it can never be the heart of it. It involves a mechanical process that may prove devastating for the reader’s psychic quotient. Reading should be all about enjoying, not writing & criticizing the mother article right from the introduction. Finally, all books do not require marking. The subject of the book determines the logic as to what should be done with it. Indiscriminate marking in each & every book only alleviates complexity.

Marking nevertheless has helped me in getting over numerous socio-political theories in books like Machiavelli’s, ‘The Prince’, Karl Marx’s ‘Das Capital’ & Robert Bresson’s ‘Theory of Film Language’. The markings in these books were mainly simplified summaries of the original text. It was written with the Endeavour to explore the inner world of this literature in an easier manner.

He feels that marking is the only way through which a reader can delve into ‘the heart of a book’. Alder says that the man who truly owns his books would fail to preserve them as all the books would remain in a depleted & ill-maintained condition.

Adler finally speaks about the course of action which teaches to mark a book smartly. The enumerated process includes underlining major points, use of critical lines at the margin, using stars, or asterisks sparingly, marking with numbers to indicate the sequence of points, etc. The numbers of other pages in the margin should indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked. Circling keywords or phrases can be done within a book. Finally, a note can be written in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page.

A brief note on Sam Anderson’s work

In a nutshell, Sam Anderson’s marking manual is a more updated & modernized version of his predecessor’s work. Anderson denotes that he was initially quite apprehensive about Adler’s theories but as time passed he felt that it was the most wonderful way of treating &analyzing a book. Anderson takes the process of bookmarking to the next level when he justifies it as an indigenous form of art. He says that reading a book without marking is equivalent to ‘eating a candy through its wrapper’.

A brief estimation of the theologies

It is unquestionable that Adler develops & procreates the unique phenomenon of bookmarking. Nevertheless, it emerges as a rigid & mechanical approach towards reading a book. Anderson too follows in his footsteps. He implements creative ideas into this subject but in the end, one feels that it is practically impossible to inject flexibility & creativity amidst rigidity. The indiscriminate marking of books for the sake of intellectualism seems a cliché idea. Anderson speaks of ‘rolling around in the text’ whereby he means to gather & collect all the proteins & vitamins embedded within the layers & dimensions of a book.  We may conclude it as a novel idea but the point remains that this process can never be universally applicable.