The Best Part of Every Book

After our family got back from our ten day vacation through Nebraska and Colorado, we did what most families do: we looked back at our pictures. This was the first vacation for Elise, our seven year old, to have a fully functioning digital camera. Therefore we had two cameras worth of pictures to go back through, along with a full CD of pictures from our whitewater rafting experience. Going back through the pictures allowed us to relive the vacation, one day at a time. We obviously couldn't see whole days, but we felt them. We remembered the places and smells and joy and trepidation associated with each. They told our story to us one more time, one highlight at time, in a way that only we who had experience the whole trip could really understand.

Despite the hard time I give my wife about the sheer volume of pictures our family takes, she knows I appreciate having the story. And in many ways, this is the same way I like to read books.

The best part of every book is walking back through, after reading the book in it's entirety, and copying down every passage that I've highlighted or every note that I've jotted in the margin. I gave myself the liberty to read my books with a pen in hand several years ago, and it's one of the best things I've ever done as a reader. The freedom to take my pen and make the text my own, circling and underlining and connecting and commenting, dirtying the clean page with my mess, allows me to breathe a second life into the book - my own. These books were the authors'; now they are ours together.

When I deface the page with pen, I don't spend a lot of time there. I hover, I ponder, I appreciate, and then I move on. I don't want to disrupt the rhythm. The author has established a cadence so that this sentence, the one that has grabbed me in some way, has both a sentence before and a sentence after, and they inform each other and demand that I feel and think a certain way, one clause at a time, as I come across the content.

But there is a time to spend with those pieces. I used to be depressed when I came to the end of a great book. It was not a sense of accomplishment; it was a loss. No longer. After the final period, I wait a day. Or a week. I go back to page one and flip one page at a time, looking for ink. And then I get to relive the text all over again. But it's not only an experience of reading my favorite passages all over; it's also a reliving of each day of reading the book again, of the feelings associated with those days, of the events, of the settings.

I recently went back through and typed out my notes for Shauna Niequist's Bread and Wine, a book I read both at home and on vacation. As I jogged through the last half of the book, I smelled the mountain air of Colorado all over again. I felt the comfortable satisfaction of reading on the porch of our bunkhouse at Garden of the Gods Campground. I remembered the hikes, the swimming, the boundless energy of children on vacation, and whatever else was going on the day I read those pages. Before that, there was the passage that caused me to relive sitting in my recliner at home on a quiet morning before anyone else was up, breathless, as her writing conjured up the emotions and fears of miscarriage, ones that I had long ago attempted to bury. Or the one I read right after a run, in which she describes her marathon experience, and I could see and hear and feel mile 15 with her with the half-baked idea to do it all over again. The best of the best, the most intense, the most thought-provoking, the most condemning sentences - my personal highlight reel of reading Bread and Wine, all played before my eyes.

I'm finding the same experience in my Bible reading as well. Reading back through a chapter, or an entire book of the Bible, reviewing my notes and highlights, ties all of the reading back into a threaded web. What is most interesting is when I'm using my old NIV, the one I got back in the 4th grade, and I can see all that I've ever highlighted or written in the margins. I can tell the season of life by pen color, sometimes even the other books I had been reading at the time based on my scribbled notes. I can see my growth. Unfortunately, I can see my intended growth as well. In the margins is the history of a man, at least the history of when that man was humble enough to read his Bible.

You can't get than in an app. You can't get that in a verse of the day, or quote of the day. Those tools are fine. They have a purpose, and anything that gets us more Bible and more literature and more sentences into our head are tools to be used. And I use them. But they do not communicate experience. They do not tell time.

Tonight I begin a new book. I just got Roy Peter Clark's most recent text on writing. I love Clark's work. I can't wait to start. But I know the best is a long way off, not until after the final page. I look forward to the journey.