Which are you?

Teaching English 1001 for LSU-Alexandria requires that I read many of the essays in our text.  Of course, I have to read the essays assigned for the course, but I do occasionally read other essays simply because I need to absorb written  words.

Tonight I spent a couple of hours reading the assigned text.  While doing so, I wrote notes in the margins analyzing the essays and highlighted passages that I want to discuss with students.  Imagine my surprise when I read Anne Fadiman's essay, "Never Do That to a Book."  It's an interesting essay in which Fadiman divides readers into two distinct groups: courtly lovers, who treat books with overzealous respect, and carnal lovers, who make books their own by writing notes, underlining, etc.

Have you figured me out yet?  I'm a carnal book lover but only when I'm reading one of my own personal books and only when the book is a text book (or my personal Bible) and I need to be able to see my notes and the text together.  It's so helpful to me to have the note RIGHT THERE, where the literary device is.  I love big white space--all that room to take notes is wonderful.


I've said many times that I'm a wolf reader, meaning that I wolf down words, all words, as though my appetite can't be satisfied.  Gobbling them up as though someone else will eat the words before I do.  Others may be able to relish books, tasting every word, reading slowly and methodically, but I could never do that. If I have an hour or a day or even two or three days to read, I want to read as much and as many books as I can wolf down.  After all, there is always another book waiting, another by a favorite author, another part of the series, another author yet undiscovered.  How anyone can read as though time will never end, I can not fathom.


I suspect that heaven carries every manner of books, that we'll be able to read as part of our adoration of God, but I also suspect that Shakespeare, Steinbeck, Wharton, Eliot, and the rest are also still writing.  Thus, while I can read for eternity, how can I ever read it all?

In the end I've discovered that I'm a carnal book lover with a wolfish appetite!  How would you describe your bookish self?