answering the whys and wherefores

A very dear and sweet friend of mine ;) asked if I would share my inspiration for the "marginalia" posts. In acquiescence:

My desire to learn new and especially long or interesting sounding words started one summer as I read a novel. I don't know what about that particular book sparked my hunger for black and white morsels, but my enthusiasm has only grown stronger over the months. I started jotting down vocabulary I wasn't familiar with on a piece of scrap paper. Later I looked the words up in a dictionary and wrote out the definitions.

This last fall I started a new humanities program called Gileskirk. It suggests that the student write in a journal several times a week. The entries should contain quotes, vocab, thoughts, and ideas about what is read. But, as you can imagine, I was having a hard time making the entries. So, I decided to expand the scope of them and try to incorporate them into what I already do for school. Curtis was telling me about his "common place" book. It is a notebook that he writes quotes in as he is doing his assigned reading. I still keep a written record of most of what I type in my posts, but I do like to share some of them with y'all.

"Marginalia" is simply "marginal notes." As I have learned to love learing and enjoy reading books with depth, I have begun to mark, make notes in, and underline in my books. Now, most of my books have lines, arrows, squiggles, colors, stickers, bookmarkS, or comments on the side. =D I have heard that "How to Read a Book," and "How to Read Slowly" deal with the same ideas. Needless to say they are on my list of books to read this year. Well, much of what I post about I have underlined or otherwise made note of in my books (unless of course they are Mom's school books, and then I have to limit myself to just copying out the selections). I basically just post snippets of what I am learning, what impressed me as I was reading, and the newest neat words that I come across (I still have a word-philia and can't imagine the day I will cease).

So that's why I post "marginalia" and what gave me the idea.