In The Margins

In the Margins: Notes on the Art of Active Reading

My mum used to mark a J in the inside cover of library books with a soft pencil, to show that my dad had already read them. Dru Ann Love’s record of what she reads evolved into an award-winning, guest-infested daily blog. Where do you sit when it comes to reading notes? Do you keep a record, write reviews, make annotations in the margins . . .?

 

I’ve abandoned the idea of keeping a list of the books I’ve read. But I do leave traces —marks, asterisks, double-underlines in the margins. I suppose I fall into the “active reader” camp, which for me involves the hand, the eye, and a slowed-down mind.

    In school, I used to underline passages in literature not just to remember them, but to understand how they worked. It was like poking around inside a clock. I’d mark rhetorical structures — anaphora, antithesis, parallelism — and try to see how an author used them to build rhythm or turn an argument. Charles Dickens was a favorite for this. No one piles on a clause quite like Dickens.

    Active reading, to me, is a bit like what medieval monks did with marginalia: an ongoing conversation with the text. It’s different from the rainbow flood of highlighting I saw in high school or at university, which felt more like panic-prepping for an exam than engaging with a writer. When you mark deliberately — with pencil, pen, or even typed notes — you’re practicing discernment. You’re tuning your ear to cadence, your eye to structure, and your mind to nuance.

    These days, many readers do their marking digitally — and I get it. Kindle lets you highlight passages, even shows you what other people have highlighted. (A sort of group annotation, or maybe a literary popularity contest?) But it can feel like walking into a museum and seeing stickers next to the paintings: “Everyone liked this brushstroke.” Helpful, sure. But also, weirdly disembodied. A Kindle highlight disappears into the cloud; a pencil mark on the page feels like a footprint. Your footprint.

    Plus, have you ever tried flipping back through a Kindle to find that one quote you meant to remember? It’s like trying to hitchhike through fog.

    When I was studying Latin, I learned to scan a sentence and find the verb first. Everything radiated from that one word. I started noticing how authors arranged their ideas — where they placed the temporal phrase, how subject and object shifted around the sentence. Romance languages taught me that English’s S-V-O structure wasn’t a universal. That opened up a whole new layer of pattern recognition in my reading life.

    One trick I still use: I’ll take a sentence I love and write it out by hand. Or type it. Something about the tactile act lets you feel the sentence differently — its rhythm, balance, weight. Try it with Faulkner, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald and you’ll know what I mean. Faulkner gallops, Hemingway jabs, Fitzgerald sways.

    And then there’s James Baldwin. Baldwin doesn’t just write — he preaches, in the most literary and lyrical sense. You can hear his father’s pulpit in his cadence, but also poetry, jazz, and fire. Here’s a sentence from The Fire Next Time:

    “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.”

    That line stopped me the first time I read it. It’s deceptively simple — but look closer:

• There’s assonance in live without / live within — a mirrored, almost incantatory rhythm.
• The parallel structure of we fear we cannot... and we know we cannot... tightens the line and heightens contrast — a classic rhetorical move.
• And then the antithesis of without vs within — it’s not just poetic, it’s philosophical. Baldwin turns a sentence into a paradox you feel in your chest.

    Copying out that line by hand taught me something about restraint and repetition — how Baldwin’s power often comes from what’s left unsaid. His sentences don’t shout. They resonate.

    So while I may not jot a J in the front cover of a library book like some wise mothers do (a system I secretly admire), I do leave behind a field of light pencil lines — artifacts of a mind at work, or maybe just at play.

    For me, that’s the joy of reading: not just absorbing the story, but developing a relationship with language itself.