I read everything. Ok, maybe not everything, but I read a lot. It is an eclectic card catalog of books I’ve read. Mostly non-fiction, I have a never ending appetite for learning. I have been this way as long as I can remember. As a child, I actually liked school. There were times things were difficult to learn, but mostly those things weren’t interesting to me in the first place.

I usually obsess over the history of a thing wanting to learn how the concept or theory or story or theorem was created. I want to know how the author/ creator/ inventor’s mind works; how they came up with such a thing. Sometimes their personal history tells a great story and explains it. Sometimes history in general, the time they live(d) in, explains the necessity of a thing. Sometimes it’s a fluke/miracle.

I used to look on my books as sacred things that should not be marred with my thoughts or dog-eared with my intent to revisit. I would keep notebooks full of notes I would write to myself; thoughts about what I was reading. I would find these notebooks (and still do on occasion) and read them without the book available to reference [I would put page numbers on my notes to reference the comment] because I had given it away or it was sacrificed in a move. Eventually, I graduated to writing notes on post-its and put them in the book where the thought was. This worked until I re-read the book and removed the post-it to read the words under it and sometimes the note didn’t make it back where it was. Still, I was preserving the integrity of the book. I didn’t mar its sacredness.

I still think books are a bit sacred. The concepts and information they contain, whether purely for entertainment or conveying some sort of information, is someone’s thoughts and in fact their life on the page.

I stopped putting post-it notes on the page and have gone straight to the margins, writing my thoughts on the page right next to the author’s words, in ink. Somehow, this makes the book mine; the transfer of ownership from the author to the reader.

As a writer that is a comforting thought, to know that when someone reads what I write we become co-owners of the thought that provoked the thing in the first place. We don’t have to agree, but the thought spreads just the same.