Still Taking Notes ... Why?

Early in my adulthood (yes, I've had one--despite some contrary evidence) I would underline sentences and passages in the books I was reading, a habit from college days when I read the assigned books (well, let's be honest: most of them ... let's be more honest: some of them).

But I soon realized that my markings were actually diminishing the value of the books--I mean, it's not as if F. Scott Fitzgerald were underlining Hemingway's latest, right?

So I began taking notes on notebook paper, a practice I continue to this day.

For years, it made sense. I was teaching English, and I often referred to those notes for things I was doing in class. Obviously, I can't remember everything I've read (but, oh, do I wish I could!). In fact, I find it somewhat embarrassing now when people ask me if I've been reading anything good. Sure, I have ... but give me a few hours to remember what they are ... Quick recall is an early casualty in the War Against Increasing Age.

Now, I don't take notes on every book I read. There are quite I few I read merely for entertainment. Thrillers, mysteries, etc. And there are others I annotate (in light pencil) in the front of the book--I just did this with the latest Nathaniel Philbrick title, In the Hurricane's Eye (2018), a book about the American victory at Yorktown, the battle that essentially ended the Revolutionary War. (I will post more about this book in Sunday Sundries.) Joyce will erase those notes when/if she puts the title up for sale.

But for many books--mostly literary fiction and biography and literary criticism and history--I take pages and pages and pages of notes, pages that I then file in our ever billowing and multiplying file cabinets out on the glassed-in porch at the back of the house.

I also review a book/week for Kirkus Reviews (I'm closing in on 1500 reviews for them; I began in March 1999), and those notes are in file boxes stacked in the basement--a dry basement, now that we have spent ... a lot ... having it waterproofed.

And each time I start a new book, a new first page of notes, I ask myself--in a voice that has become increasingly loud and insistent (in my head, not in the air)--Why are you doing this?

I'm not going to go back into the classroom. I've not been invited to do a talk/speech in a couple of years--and am not likely to be asked again (what could an Old Guy possibly have to say that's relevant?). And, yes, I do refer occasionally to those files--checking because of something I'm writing--but I'd say that, oh, 95% of the files I've never opened--except to stick in some more notes on the same subject.

So the question remains: Why am I doing this?

And the only answer I have--feeble as it seems--is this: Because I need to.