Ap English Literature & Composition

AP ENGLISH LITERATURE & COMPOSITION

Summer Assignment

While The Things They Carried is a novel about the Vietnam War, it represents so much more. It is a short-story collection that reads like a memoir, challenging our ideas about truth and fiction. The novel is an example of “meta-fiction” and speaks to the role storytelling plays in our lives. The stories are connected in surprising ways such that multiple, close readings only enhance this literary experience.

In AP Literature you are required to read “deliberately and thoroughly, taking time to understand a work’s complexity.” This will involve close reading, whereby you ANNOTATE a text AS YOU READ and REREAD. This is not a natural process for many readers, but it is a habit that strong readers practice. It should be a slow process, so give yourself plenty of time to complete this assignment. A well-annotated piece has margins full of comments, has the text marked up, words circled or boxed, and lines drawn to show connections. If you are borrowing a book from Open, use post-it notes to record your thinking. If you purchase your own book, make it yours by writing in the margins and having a conversation with the author and characters. Focus not just on the content (what is written) but the form (how it is written).

To assist you in this process you will first read the article, “How To Mark a Book” and Billy Collins’ poem “Marginalia.” Consider all the ways that you can connect with what you are reading. A basic question to ask is just, “what do you notice?” Merely highlighting or underlining passages is not annotation. Instead consider doing the following:

Common Annotation Techniques

● Ask questions when anything is unclear. ● Define unfamiliar words. ● Identify the narrator, the point of view, and the tone. ● Make inferences about characters and their motivation. ● Mark interesting uses of diction, syntax, figurative language, and imagery. ● Consider themes as they emerge. ● Explore the setting and its significance. ● Take note of the form/structure. Is the narrative linear or non-linear with flashbacks? ● Explore why the author used a particular word or phrase. ● Make connections to other parts of the text. ● Make connections to other texts you have read or seen. ● Rewrite, paraphrase, or summarize a particularly difficult passage. ● Identify punctuation marks in order “chuck” your reading and rereading. ● Make connections to your personal experiences. ● Explain the historical and/or social context. ● Offer an interpretation or claim. ● Draw a picture when a visual connection is appropriate or to understand imagery. ● Identify literary techniques and explain connection to meaning.

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BACKGROUND TO VIETNAM WAR A long and unsuccessful effort by South Vietnam and the United States to prevent the Communists of North Vietnam from reuniting the country under their leadership. Watch the Ken Burns’ documentary here.

Glossary of Common US Military Terms

AO Area of Operation KIA Killed in Action LP Listening Patrol LSA cleaner and lubricant for weapons LZ Landing Zone M-60 machine gun M-16 standard military rifle PFC Private First Class RTO Radio and Telephone Operator PRC Portable Radio Communication PsyOps Psychological warfare (Ops = operations) R&R Rest and Relaxation RTO Radio Telephone Operator SOP Standard Operating Procedure USO United Service Organization (volunteer entertainment and morale) VC Viet Cong soldiers fighting the Americans

SETTING Author Tim O’Brien was an infantryman (foot soldier) in Vietnam from 1968-1970 in 3rd Platoon, Company A (Alpha). Although O’Brien uses time shifts in the story, the tour of duty of the Alpha Company soldiers in The Things They Carried is thought to be from 1968-1969. Also, you will see that the physical setting of the novel shifts between Vietnam (mostly Quang Ngai province on the central coast) and the United States

MAJOR CHARACTERS ● Jimmy Cross: a sensitive Lieutenant who must lead his men through Vietnam ● Kiowa: a devout Baptist, and an American Indian ● Norman Bowker: a quiet, polite soldier ● Rat Kiley: a 19 year old medic ● Tim O’Brien: the narrator and a fictional persona of O’Brien the writer

MINOR CHARACTERS ● Martha: the girl Jimmy Cross loves ● Henry Dobbins: a kind, gentle soldier ● Ted Lavender: the first man to die in their company ● Dave Jensen: a young, naive and paranoid soldier ● Mitchell Sanders: a literate soldier with strong convictions ● Lee Strunk: a soldier who faces death ● Azar: a young soldier with no sense of the gravity of death ● Curt Lemon: a soldier and Rat Kiley’s best friend ● Kathleen: Tim’s young daughter ● Elroy Berdahl: owner of the Tip Top Lodge

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● Green Berets: soldiers who set themselves apart from others ● Mark Fossie: a young soldier who brings in girlfriend to Vietnam ● Mary Anne Bell: Mark Fossie’s girlfriend who travels to Vietnam ● Dead man: the man Tim killed--or didn’t kill ● Bobby Jorgenson: the medic who replaces Rat Kiley ● Linda: the first girl Tim ever loved

NARRATIVE METHOD: One of the reasons this novel is such an essential text for AP Literature is its Post-Modern storytelling techniques and complex narration. In the title story, the third-person narrator is unidentified, but in other stories he is a fictional character named Tim O’Brien. He describes the soldiers and events in Quang Ngai province. This narrator is omniscient, since he is privy to the interior thoughts and feelings other characters, especially Lt. Jimmy Cross; yet, the narrator is a third-person limited omniscient narrator in that he only reveals partial, fragmented, or incomplete information about the characters and events of the story. However, you will see that in most of the stories, the point of view is first person. Besides O’Brien’s complex and shifting narrative point of view, you will see that the structure of the story is also complex: a fragmented and nonlinear narrative, moving within and between memory and present day. Tracing this unusual storytelling method and understanding why O’Brien chose it is one of the pleasures of studying this novel.

LANGUAGE TECHNIQUES ● Figurative Language (simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification, oxymoron, synecdoche) ● Imagery (visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile) ● Syntax (catalogue, repetition, anaphora, polysyndeton, asyndeton, parallelism, fragments) ● Irony (paradox, negation, antithesis, verbal/situational irony)

NOVEL OPENING QUOTATION: After the book’s Contents, there is a quote from John Ransom’s Andersonville Diary. During the American Civil War (1861-1865), Ransom was a twenty-year-old Union soldier who was captured by the Confederate Army in Tennessee in 1863; the book is a first-hand account of his time in the Confederate prison camp where 13,000 prisoners died.

ASSIGNMENT

1. Read and annotate the novel according to the guidelines, readings, and attached rubric. 2. In complete sentences, answer a minimum of 3 questions for each chapter that follows. These should be FULLY developed, addressing all parts of the question and providing clear examples from the text, with page numbers. Responses should be typed, single spaced, and proofread for errors. Be able to defend your answers orally in class.

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THE STORIES

"The Things They Carried"

1. In what sense does Jimmy love Martha? Why does he construct this elaborate (mostly fictional) relationship with her? What does he get out of it? 2. Why do the soldiers tell jokes about the war, about killing? 3. Discuss the role of shame, embarrassment, and fear in the story. 4. How has Jimmy changed by the end of the story? How will he be a different person from this point on? What has he learned about himself? Or to put it another way, what has he lost and what has he gained? 5. How does O’Brien structure the story about Ted Lavender? Why do you think he does this? 6. What is the point of view of the titular story? How does the affect the reading experience? 7. Select a passage that was especially memorable in terms of language use (e.g., diction, imagery, figurative language, etc.) Copy the passage in its entirety. Explain why you selected and what the effect is.

"Love" 1. The first story in The Things They Carried was told in the third person, but now the point of view switches to first person. What effect does this have on you as a reader? 2. What is the setting of this chapter? 3. What does Jimmy Cross confess to Tim O’Brien when he comes to visit him after the war? What is O’Brien’s response? 4. What does the story show about the lives of war veterans? 5. O’Brien reveals that he has guilt that he cannot get over too, but he does not tell us what happened that makes him feel this way. How does this make you feel about O’Brien and his stories when he leaves you with unanswered questions?

"Spin" 1. What is the point of view of the story “Spin”? How do you know? Write one line that shows the point of view. 2. Tim O’Brien shares several bad, peaceful, and happy stories in this chapter. Which war story leaves an impression on you? Explain why. 3. According to the narrator, how is a game of checkers different from war? 4. What happens to Kiowa? 5. What happens to Curt Lemon? 6. Why do you think Azar blows up Ted Lavender’s puppy? 7. Using specific details from the story, explain the title, “Spin.”

"On the Rainy River" 1. When Tim O’Brien was drafted into the war, how did he feel about the American war in Vietnam? Why did he feel this way? Provide examples. 2. In the first two pages of the story, notice the diction of negation (never…not…not…) and shame (embarrassment, squirm, shame), along with the use of hypothetical statements (if…if…) and many question marks on page 40—what is significant about all of these writing techniques? 3. How does the story of Tim’s work at the meatpacking plant contribute to the larger story about war? What literary techniques does O’Brien use in this section (pp. 42-43)?

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4. "On the Rainy River" deals with the narrator’s painful struggle after he receives his draft notice. What is the moral struggle he faces? What are his fears? What people or things factor into his dilemma? 5. In the story we learn the 21-year-old O'Brien's theory of courage: "Courage, I seemed to think, comes to us in finite quantities, like an inheritance, and by being frugal and stashing it away and letting it earn interest, we steadily increase our moral capital in preparation for that day when the account must be drawn down. It was a comforting theory.” What literary technique does this represent? In your own words, explain how Tim O’Brien view courage. 6. In this story we meet the important figure of Elroy Berdahl. What do you think Berdahl thinks of O’Brien? How does he show concern for the young man in crisis? Why doesn’t Berdahl ask O’Brien why he’s there? What does the old man represent? What does Elroy Berdahl do that leads O’Brien to call him “the hero of my life”? Examine the paragraph on the top of page 60, in which the narrator compares Berdahl to the river, the late-summer sun, God, and gods “who look on in absolute silence as we live our lives, as we make our choices or fail to make them.” 7. There are several examples of fantastical scenes in this story, such as on page 42 where he imagines his life in Canada, then on page 48, where he imagines being chased by the Border Patrol, and on pages 55-56, where he imagines an audience of his life. What purpose do these scenes serve? 8. As O’Brien asks of his readers on page 54, “What would you do?”

"How to Tell a True War Story" 1. O’Brien offers several definitions for a “true war story” throughout “How to Tell a True War Story.” What are the qualities of a “true war story,” according to O’Brien? In O’Brien’s definition, how are the stories of Curt Lemon’s death and the LP’s (listening patrol’s) experience true war stories? 2. “Unreliable narrator” is the literary term for a narrator whose credibility is compromised by lack of information, bias, his or her mental state, or a deliberate desire to deceive. How are the soldiers who tell stories (such as Sanders and O’Brien) unreliable narrators? 3. What does the narrator mean by the line, “if you don’t care for the truth, watch how you vote” (66) 4. What does Mitchell Sanders mean when he tells O’Brien, “Hear that quiet, man? That quiet—just listen. There’s your moral” (74)? 5. Why does Rat Kiley torture the baby buffalo? How do you explain his and his squad’s reaction as they watch him? 6. What is notable about the end of page 81, the last paragraph of the story? What does it mean? What writing techniques are used? 7. What is the reason for and effect of the repetition of the story of Curt Lemon’s death in this story?

"Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong 1. What is Rat Kiley’s reputation as a storyteller? How is he an unreliable narrator? What does he do to the truth, and why? 2. What does Mary Anne Bell represent to the men in the medical detachment? What do we learn about her personality and other traits in this first section? What is the men’s assessment of her? What techniques does O’Brien use to characterize her? 3. Who are the Green Berets? How do they seem to operate? 4. Coming just one story after “How to Tell a True War Story,” O’Brien seems to want us to think of those issues of truth and fiction when examining the highly fantastical story that

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Rat tells in "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong.” Does it fit O'Brien's criteria for a true war story? Address with specific examples from the text. 5. How does Mary Anne progressively change in the story, physically, personality-wise, mentally? Trace her development in adjectives; for example, when she arrives she is fresh- faced, friendly… 6. Mary Anne Bell is obviously an important and emblematic character in this book. How might she illustrate society, or war, or human nature? Does it matter that Mary Anne is a young woman? What does her story tell us about the nature of the Vietnam War? 7. What knowledge does Mary Anne gain from the men around her? Why do you think she finds Vietnam so intriguing? 8. Among other techniques, O’Brien uses different diction to show Mary Anne’s change, imagery of eyes/watching/staring, dark/light, and hunger/devouring. Find examples and analyze them. 9. How is the word “lost” used differently on pages 89, 100 and 110 to describe Mary Anne? 10. What does Mary Anne mean in her speech on page 106? What do you think is her tone when she says this to her fiancée Mark? What irony is there? 11. After Rat leaves the mountain medical detachment and joins the Alpha Company, what does he learn about Mary Anne’s fate? 12. There are some interesting aspects of storytelling in this piece. How effective is Rat Kiley as a storyteller? To what extent is he or his story reliable? What is Mitchell Sanders’ comment about storytellers (97, 101-102, 107-108)? Sanders wants Rat to “tell it right” (102)—what does this mean? How might Sanders’ comments reflect the opinions or reactions of certain readers of The Things They Carried?

"The Man I Killed" 1. The story opens with one extraordinary, and extraordinarily long, sentence. What is notable about it, and why does O’Brien begin this way? 2. How does O’Brien use description and repetition in this story? What images get repeated, and why? Why does O’Brien juxtapose beautiful and grotesque imagery? 3. What sort of person does O’Brien imagine the man he killed to have been? What is O’Brien’s tone when imagining and thinking about the man? How is the man like O’Brien? 4. How is O’Brien’s reaction to the death similar to the earlier reactions to Lavender’s and Lemon’s deaths? 5. How does Azar react to the killing of the man? What does he compare the dead man to? What do these comparisons reveal about how Azar needs to deal with death?

"Speaking of Courage" 1. As one of the most poignant pieces in the book, this story moves forward in time to focus on the aftermath of war. Why does Norman Bowker struggle to re-integrate into his small Iowa town? What aspects and details of the town does Bowker focus on? 2. What is significant about themes of communication, inexpressiveness, and storytelling and audience in this story? What is interesting about the personification of the town (137)? 3. How do Sally Kramer, Max Arnold, and Norman’s father influence him? 4. Throughout the story, why does O’Brien uses the present conditional verb form “would”? What is the role of the unreal, the imagined in this story? 5. How does Bowker feel about not being able to “bring himself to be uncommonly brave”? What does he say prevented him from pulling Kiowa out of the mud? What is his definition of courage (141)? What is Bowker’s tone when thinking about the incident and his actions? 6. Norman stops the Chevy twice in the story. What does the stop at the A&W show about the town and Norman’s place in it? What do you make of the last paragraph in the park?

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7. Aside from "The Things They Carried," "Speaking of Courage" is the only other story written in third person. Why do you think O’Brien made this choice? What does he achieve by doing so?

"Notes" 1. What is the impact of the first sentence, the last sentence? What is the impact of using excerpts from Bowker’s letter? 2. How is O’Brien’s post-war experience different from Bowker’s? How does O’Brien feel about this contrast? 3. In what ways and to what effect does O’Brien mix truth and fiction? Does your appreciation of “Speaking of Courage” change when you learn in this story, “Notes,” that some parts are invented? What do you learn from “Notes” that affects your understanding of Bowker’s actions and feelings in the previous story? 4. What is the role of storytelling for O’Brien? What do we learn about the act of writing (152)?

"In the Field" 1. What is the point of view of this story? How do you know? Why is this narrative choice significant? What other stories use this point of view? 2. Norman Bowker says, “’Nobody’s fault…Everybody’s’” (168); O'Brien writes, "When a man died, there had to be blame” (169). What does this rule do to the men of O'Brien's company? Are they justified in thinking themselves at fault? How do they cope with their own feelings of culpability? 3. Who is the unnamed young soldier that Jimmy Cross watches and speaks to? What is the young soldier thinking on page 163-164? Why is it interesting that the soldier is unnamed, and that Cross doesn’t remember his name? 4. How do the soldiers exhibit different (or similar) reactions to loss and trauma? 5. What do we learn about Cross’s thoughts and feelings about being a leader? Why doesn’t Cross get angry with the young soldier for searching for the picture instead of searching for Kiowa? In what way is this Jimmy Cross different from the first story in the book? How has he changed? What is the connection between O’Brien the writer/narrator and Cross the leader/letter writer? 6. In what way does the character Azar develop in this story?

"The Ghost Soldiers" 1. How do Rat Kiley and Bobby Jorgenson react to O’Brien’s two gunshot incidents? How are the medics similar and different? 2. What role does the Morty Phillips story serve in “The Ghost Soldiers”? 3. How and why does O’Brien feel bitter? alienated? envious? 4. When, where, and how does O’Brien identify or sympathize with Jorgenson? 5. In this story O’Brien has two passages in which he describes moving out of his body, and this abstract idea of the divided self is made concrete, a concept called “reification.” (198, 203) What is interesting about these moments, writing-wise? What purpose does this concept of reification serve for him at those moments, and for him as storyteller? 6. This story is connected to two previous ones, “Enemies” and “Friends.” In what ways is the conflict between O’Brien and Jorgenson similar or different to that between Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk? 7. How could the O’Brien we see in “The Ghost Soldiers” be linked to Mary Anne Bell in “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong”?

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8. How has Jorgenson’s character developed? How has O’Brien’s? How do you feel about O’Brien’s actions in this story? Has your assessment of him changed? What is the tone of last lines (207)? 9. "The Ghost Soldiers" is one of the only stories of The Things They Carried in which we don't know the ending in advance. Why might O'Brien want this story to be suspenseful?

"The Lives of the Dead" 1. What is the effect of the anecdote about the old man’s corpse? What does that scene show about O’Brien? Where are there other examples in this story of the idea of looking at the dead? 2. Timmy’s first love Linda is another emblematic character. What do you make of her? What does she represent in O’Brien’s life, in the novel? What do O’Brien’s 9-year-old behavior with her, and later her illness, show? What is interesting about their imagined conversation on page 231-232? 3. Why does O’Brien intersperse the story of Linda with anecdotes and references to the war? 4. What ideas about the role of stories and storytelling does O’Brien forward in this piece? How is language used by soldiers (225-226) and by O’Brien? 5. What is the role of dreams for O’Brien? How is the last paragraph of the book a powerful ending? 6. To what extent is this story an effective ending for the novel?

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Name ______Text ______

Novel Annotation Rubric

Evaluation Criteria Score The text is extensively “marked up” with underlining, circling, highlighting, and with many margin notes. The annotations demonstrate that the student has carefully read and considered the text’s meaning. The 100 - 90 margin notes serve as an abbreviated outline of what the text says and what the reader thinks about it. The reader appears extremely engaged in the text based on the quantity and quality of annotations. The text is extensively “marked-up” with fewer highlighted or underlined parts and fewer margin notes compared to the most carefully considered readings. Shorthand notations are present. The annotations 89 - 80 which are there demonstrate that the student has carefully read and considered the text’s meaning. The reader appears engaged in the text based on the annotations. The text is less extensively “marked-up” with inconsistently highlighted or underlined parts and with fewer margin notes and shorthand markings. The 79 - 70 annotations demonstrate a less thorough reading of the work than the top two ratings. It may not be clear that the reader is engaged with the text on a deep level. The text is highlighted or underlined and the student uses some shorthand markings. There are few margin notes or the quality is 69 - 60 poor; consequently, it is impossible to determine how thorough the reading of the text has been. Few if any shorthand margin notations are used or part of the text is unmarked or there 59 - 0 are so few notations overall that the text may not have been read completely.

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Marginalia

By Billy Collins

Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like why wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. "Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. "Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge.

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Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird signing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- "Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

From Sailing Alone Around the Room (2002)

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“How to Mark a Book” By Mortimer J. Adler, Ph.D. from The Radical Academy

You know you have to read "between the lines" to get the most out of anything. I want to persuade you to do something equally important in the course of your reading. I want to persuade you to write between the lines. Unless you do, you are not likely to do the most efficient kind of reading. I contend, quite bluntly, that marking up a book is not an act of mutilation but of love. You shouldn't mark up a book which isn't yours. Librarians (or your friends) who lend you books expect you to keep them clean, and you should. If you decide that I am right about the usefulness of marking books, you will have to buy them. Most of the world's great books are available today, in reprint editions. 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 blood stream to do you any good. Confusion about what it means to "own" a book leads people to a false reverence for paper, binding, and type -- a respect for the physical thing -- the craft of the printer rather than the genius of the author. They forget that it is possible for a man to acquire the idea, to possess the beauty, which a great book contains, without staking his claim by pasting his bookplate inside the cover. Having a fine library doesn't prove that its owner has a mind enriched by books; it proves nothing more than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich enough to buy them. There are three kinds of book owners. The first has all the standard sets and best sellers -- unread, untouched. (This deluded individual owns woodpulp and ink, not books.) The second has a great many books -- a few of them read through, most of them dipped into, but all of them as clean and shiny as the day they were bought. (This person would probably like to make books his own, but is restrained by a false respect for their physical appearance.) The third has a few books or many -- every one of them dog-eared and dilapidated, shaken and loosened by continual use, marked and scribbled in from front to back. (This man owns books.) Is it false respect, you may ask, to preserve intact and unblemished a beautifully printed book, an elegantly bound edition? Of course not. I'd no more scribble all over a first edition of 'Paradise Lost' than I'd give my baby a set of crayons and an original Rembrandt. I wouldn't mark up a painting or a statue. Its soul, so to speak, is inseparable from its body. And the beauty of a rare edition or of a richly manufactured volume is like that of a painting or a statue. But the soul of a book "can" be separate from its body. A book is more like the score of a piece of music than it is like a painting. No great musician confuses a symphony with the printed sheets of music. Arturo Toscanini reveres Brahms, but Toscanini's score of the G minor Symphony is so thoroughly marked up that no one but the maestro himself can read it. The reason why a great conductor makes notations on his musical scores -- marks them up again and again each time he returns to study them--is the reason why you should mark your books. If your respect for magnificent binding or typography gets in the way, buy yourself a cheap edition and pay your respects to the author. Why is marking up a book indispensable to reading? First, it keeps you awake. (And I don't mean merely conscious; I mean awake.) In the second place; reading, if it is active, is thinking, and thinking tends to express itself in words, spoken or written. The marked book is usually the

AP ENGLISH LITERATURE & COMPOSITION thought-through book. Finally, writing helps you remember the thoughts you had, or the thoughts the author expressed. Let me develop these three points. If reading is to accomplish anything more than passing time, it must be active. You can't let your eyes glide across the lines of a book and come up with an understanding of what you have read. Now an ordinary piece of light fiction, like, say, "Gone With the Wind," doesn't require the most active kind of reading. The books you read for pleasure can be read in a state of relaxation, and nothing is lost. But a great book, rich in ideas and beauty, a book that raises and tries to answer great fundamental questions, demands the most active reading of which you are capable. You don't absorb the ideas of John Dewey the way you absorb the crooning of Mr. Vallee. You have to reach for them. That you cannot do while you're asleep. If, when you've finished reading a book, the pages are filled with your notes, you know that you read actively. The most famous "active" reader of great books I know is President Hutchins, of the University of Chicago. He also has the hardest schedule of business activities of any man I know. He invariably reads with a pencil, and sometimes, when he picks up a book and pencil in the evening, he finds himself, instead of making intelligent notes, drawing what he calls 'caviar factories' on the margins. When that happens, he puts the book down. He knows he's too tired to read, and he's just wasting time. But, you may ask, why is writing necessary? Well, the physical act of writing, with your own hand, brings words and sentences more sharply before your mind and preserves them better in your memory. To set down your reaction to important words and sentences you have read, and the questions they have raised in your mind, is to preserve those reactions and sharpen those questions. Even if you wrote on a scratch pad, and threw the paper away when you had finished writing, your grasp of the book would be surer. But you don't have to throw the paper away. The margins (top as bottom, and well as side), the end-papers, the very space between the lines, are all available. They aren't sacred. And, best of all, your marks and notes become an integral part of the book and stay there forever. You can pick up the book the following week or year, and there are all your points of agreement, disagreement, doubt, and inquiry. It's like resuming an interrupted conversation with the advantage of being able to pick up where you left off. And that is exactly what reading a book should be: a conversation between you and the author. Presumably he knows more about the subject than you do; naturally, you'll have the proper humility as you approach him. But don't let anybody tell you that a reader is supposed to be solely on the receiving end. Understanding is a two-way operation; learning doesn't consist in being an empty receptacle. The learner has to question himself and question the teacher. He even has to argue with the teacher, once he understands what the teacher is saying. And marking a book is literally an expression of differences, or agreements of opinion, with the author. There are all kinds of devices for marking a book intelligently and fruitfully. Here's the way I do it:

● Underlining (or highlighting): of major points, of important or forceful statements. ● Vertical lines at the margin: to emphasize a statement already underlined. ● Star, asterisk, or other doo-dad at the margin: to be used sparingly, to emphasize the ten or twenty most important statements in the book. (You may want to fold the bottom comer of each page on which you use such marks. It won't hurt the sturdy paper on which most modern books are printed, and you will be able take the book off the shelf at any time and, by opening it at the folded-corner page, refresh your recollection of the book.) ● Numbers in the margin: to indicate the sequence of points the author makes in developing a single argument. ● Numbers of other pages in the margin: to indicate where else in the book the author made points relevant to the point marked; to tie up the ideas in a book, which, though they may be separated by many pages, belong together.

AP ENGLISH LITERATURE & COMPOSITION

● Circling or highlighting of key words or phrases. ● Writing in the margin, or at the top or bottom of the page, for the sake of: recording questions (and perhaps answers) which a passage raised in your mind; reducing a complicated discussion to a simple statement; recording the sequence of major points right through the books. I use the end-papers at the back of the book to make a personal index of the author's points in the order of their appearance.

The front end-papers are to me the most important. Some people reserve them for a fancy bookplate. I reserve them for fancy thinking. After I have finished reading the book and making my personal index on the back end-papers, I turn to the front and try to outline the book, not page by page or point by point (I've already done that at the back), but as an integrated structure, with a basic unity and an order of parts. This outline is, to me, the measure of my understanding of the work. If you're a die-hard anti-book-marker, you may object that the margins, the space between the lines, and the end-papers don't give you room enough. All right. How about using a scratch pad slightly smaller than the page-size of the book -- so that the edges of the sheets won't protrude? Make your index, outlines and even your notes on the pad, and then insert these sheets permanently inside the front and back covers of the book. Or, you may say that this business of marking books is going to slow up your reading. It probably will. That's one of the reasons for doing it. Most of us have been taken in by the notion that speed of reading is a measure of our intelligence. There is no such thing as the right speed for intelligent reading. Some things should be read quickly and effortlessly and some should be read slowly and even laboriously. The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through you -- how many you can make your own. A few friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will not be impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper. You may have one final objection to marking books. You can't lend them to your friends because nobody else can read them without being distracted by your notes. Furthermore, you won't want to lend them because a marked copy is kind of an intellectual diary, and lending it is almost like giving your mind away. If your friend wishes to read your Plutarch's Lives, Shakespeare, or The Federalist Papers, tell him gently but firmly, to buy a copy. You will lend him your car or your coat -- but your books are as much a part of you as your head or your heart.