The spectrum of reading

While pondering about books and how to read them I remembered one episode.

On my first or second year at University one professor asked the auditorium whether anybody knew the name of the author of Moby-Dick. He said he’d give the highest grade for the semester to the student who’d say the name. All one hundred something students went silent. I read Moby-Dick and had two impulses: first was to earn an easy grade; second was: meh! I don’t need that kind of charity, passing the semester exam would be piece of cake anyway. Finally, one girl pronounced Herman Melville’s name. For the professor it was an amusement to showcase how stupid and ignorant the younger generation of students were.

The meaning of Melville’s multifaceted book unfolds greater and greater with each year of my recalling its oceans and passions. But to return to the question that originated this memory: I really don’t know what would be the wisest way to read books that stream into my life incessantly. Should I take notes, highlight phrases and paragraphs, or simply read in a flow, letting my unconscious mind soak in all things missed by my conscious mind?

Taking notes seems a time-consuming work, especially if I simply roam around the literature without any specific topic of investigation (although I usually highlight everything related to mind, states of consciousness, existential meaning of life, transpersonal realms, etc.). If I don’t save the notes to computer sooner or later they get lost.

However, every book’s text is a landscape to be traversed and carefully explored, sometimes pioneered. Notes and highlight can really be helpful if you want to access the knowledge right away. At times being able to find the quotation I needed by searching the tag system in my Zotero notes has been helpful. Taking notes from the important books now and categorizing them in a database seems like an investment into the future.

On the other hand, some of the most profound book knowledge that I have learned seems to be the one I learned passionately through spontaneous reading with an open mind (a beginner’s mind) and a broad intention. The naive reading, so to say. The flow of books would enter my life, stay there a little bit, leave a mark or a scratch or a signature, and then go away. Some years later it would re-emerge in a huge bulk of meanings constellations. That’s probably a Romantic way of looking at reading.

But no matter what, even more influential were the texts I translated myself. These texts I digested with all my sentient being. As always, it seems everything’s really scalable and we can adapt many styles to read and use many tools to enhance our reading. Perhaps, there’s a spectrum of reading?