
A House Divided: Classic Reader Disagreements
This is a guest post from Rebecca Einstein Schorr. Rebecca is a rabbi, essayist, special needs advocate, and life-wrangler. When she’s not channeling all of the energy into her duties as chief scullery maid, freelance writer, and editor of a professional newsletter, Rebecca can be found reading. Her husband continues to marvel how it is she finds time to read when it seems that there wasn’t time for her to do the laundry. (Sorry, honey.) Chat with her on Twitter @RebeccaSchorr.
Readers are an interesting breed. A passionate lot, we tend to have very specific opinions when it comes not just to what we read but how we read.
Readers are an interesting breed. A passionate lot, we tend to have very specific opinions when it comes not just to what we read but how we read.
- Exclusive vs. Playing the Field
- Movie vs. Book
- Marked vs. Pristine
There are those who hold that the only way to respect a book is to treat it with the utmost care. They never break the binding nor dare make any mark in the text or even in the margins. Leaving aside rare, first editions where any such treatment will devalue the tome, other readers engage with the physical text in an intimate fashion. Underlining passages that resonate with them. Asking themselves questions about a particular point. Scribbling definitions of unknown words. Marking the book much the way an animal marks its territory is necessary for some readers to feel as though the book has become a part of them.
Those first readers, by the way, are sometimes physically repulsed by such actions.
I don’t understand them.
- Location, Location, Location
- Printed vs. ereader