The Pencil

Why you should hold one while you read.

A reader without a pencil is a reader who plans to forget. The pencil turns reading from a private act into a conversation: the page asks you something, and you answer in the margin.

The answer doesn’t have to be clever. Yes, no, not sure, !?, an underline. It is enough, often, to leave a record that you were once here, thinking this, against this paragraph. Three years later the record is the only thing standing between you and an unrecoverable state of having forgotten what the book did to you.

Carry a pencil. Make small marks. Stop apologizing about it in the front of the book.