Monday, June 2, 2014

Musing Mondays (3): Active Reading

A meme hosted by MizB at Should be Reading. Musing Mondays asks you to muse about one of the following each week:

• Describe one of your reading habits.
• Tell us what book(s) you recently bought for yourself or someone else, and why you chose that/those book(s).
• What book are you currently desperate to get your hands on? Tell us about it!
• Tell us what you’re reading right now — what you think of it, so far; why you chose it; what you are (or, aren’t) enjoying it.
• Do you have a bookish rant? Something about books or reading (or the industry) that gets your ire up? Share it with us!
• Instead of the above questions, maybe you just want to ramble on about something else pertaining to books — let’s hear it, then!


Today, I really wanted to talk about active reading. And I feel like there's a lot of ways to describe or to do active reading. Personally, it tends to vary for me. And I had actually stopped doing it, what I do, for a little while and then I recently got back into it. And it makes writing reviews so, so much easier. 

Active reading could be anything from writing notes in the margins or on a seperate paper, marking your favorite lines, or anything that is really more then just reading the book. My favorite is tabs, the see through kind so they don't cause problems later, but for the life of me I can't normally force myself to write in a book. I guess it's kind of silly, and I'd kind of like to do it for my favorite books, but I can't bring myself to do it.

Also - this varies between non-fiction and fiction for me. For fiction I mark normally the important things, or things I want to go back and look up to learn more about or write down so I can remember better. With fiction it's normally quotes I really liked for one reason or another, either in an intelectual sense or maybe just because I laughed at it or found it funny. I've also marked 'important' things to know in fiction, like some specific world building or something like that.

So now I've got questions for anyone reading this, feel free to answer as many or little as you like: do you active read? What do you do as active reading or consider to be active reading? Can you write in your books and do you? And, if you don't do this, are you interested in doing this is the future or have you in the past?

2 comments:

  1. I like to place tabs in my books, but I also actively write my thoughts down in a notebook. It gets a little confusing when I'm reading more than one book at once, but I like this process the best because I don't want to write in my books :p

    And YES, please read Open Road Summer! It's a good one :)

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    1. I've been meaning to start a notebook to take notes in, but I just can be reading so many books at once it almost seem like it'd be impossible. Sometimes I use post its or index cards.

      It is on my never ending TBR list, and I'm intrigued by it, and it's not a genre I read enough of. I do, though, think I'll probably wait for the paperback or when it's available from my library digitally.

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