In the next week I plan to finish the design of Translating Scripture: The Thai Book of Mormon and the cover (which I haven’t even started on yet), so that I can focus my time in this next month before the deadline (February 20) on editing and copyfitting. Let me just say that I’m really pleased with InDesign so far, much more than I ever was with Quark. Using Quark is like trying to walk in a straitjacket. (Okay, okay, maybe not quite that bad, but you get the idea.) I’ll post some drafts of the cover (which I’ll be doing in Illustrator, probably, though perhaps I’ll use InDesign instead) soon.

A while ago I started reading Jane Eyre and loved it, but for an unaccountable reason I put it down and didn’t pick it up again until last night. Now I’m determined to forge on until I finish, because it is absolutely amazing. I’ve also started reading The Silver Chair again. Ah, the memories are coming back. (I realized that I haven’t re-read Prince Caspian or Voyage of the Dawn Treader or The Horse and His Boy in a very, very long time.)

And I’m still reading How to Read a Book and Phantastes and To Draw Closer to God, which brings me to a question: is reading ten gazillion books at a time a problem? On the one hand, you get to read more books. On the other hand, however, it takes longer to get through any one book. It’s a constant dilemma for me, because I keep finding books I want to read — War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, Freakonomics, The Da Vinci Code, as just a few examples — and yet I can’t read more than five or six books at a time without bringing the whole machine to a crawl. I guess I’d better devote more time to reading. (Alas, schoolwork, you were a dear friend, but ’tis time we parted. Er, not quite yet. Give me a few more years and then I’ll get paid to read books. Mmm. Dream job. )

This morning I came across a blog entry in some thoughts which linked to the following Mortimer Adler essay: How to Mark a Book. It’s similar in many respects to the section in How to Read a Book that I mentioned the other day, but there are some juicy new quotes like this:

There are two ways in which one can own a book. The first is the property right you establish by paying for it, just as you pay for clothes and furniture. But this act of purchase is only the prelude to possession. Full ownership comes only when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it is by writing in it. An illustration may make the point clear. You buy a beefsteak and transfer it from the butcher’s icebox to your own. But you do not own the beefsteak in the most important sense until you consume it and get it into your bloodstream. I am arguing that books, too, must be absorbed in your bloodstream to do you any good.

I finished reading C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce today, for the second time. In the last 40 pages I decided to start marking passages I liked. Of those 40 pages, only 11 don’t have markings now. Here are some of the good quotes and the page numbers in my British edition:

‘Pam, Pam — no natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.’ (p.84)

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country; but none will rise again until it has been buried. (p.88-89)

Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. (p.108)

Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouths for food, or their eyes to see. (p.113)

And of course the beautiful scene with the man and his Lizard, which gives me goosebumps every time I read it. Last but not least, the scenes with Sarah Smith — “Every young man or boy that met her became her son — even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.” (p.98) I want to be like her.

Found this quote on Book Quotes while looking for a title quote for this blog:

“I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book.” —Groucho Marx

And off we go! I write about books often enough (and plan on writing about them more and more frequently) that I pretty much had to create a new blog devoted solely to books and the world surrounding them. (I probably should mention here that I’m a librarian-in-embryo and will be chronicling my adventures in library school here as well, but that won’t be for another two years or so — sorry.)

To begin, I’ve been reading Mortimer J. Adler’s How to Read a Book, and on page 49 of my edition (1972) I found the following:

When you buy a book, you establish a property right in it, just as you do in clothes or furniture when you buy and pay for them. But the act of purchase is actually only the prelude to possession in the case of a book. Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it — which comes to the same thing — is by writing in it.

Growing up with trips to the library each week, I find it difficult to write in books. The only exception so far is the scriptures; it’s “accepted” to write notes in the margins there and to underline and shade in passages. But for some reason I just can’t bring myself to do it to other books (meaning my own, of course; writing in library books is no temptation either ).

And yet it certainly has an appeal to it. Books are a huge part of my life and my books would mean a whole lot more to me if various notes and thoughts are scribbled in the margins — another record of my life, in a way. Fascinating. I’ll try it soon and let you know how it goes.