Reading 'Beloved' With Pen and Purpose

I defaced a book. And it was good.

I recently pulled Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved off the bookshelf it occupied for many years in my home and cracked the spine with three purposes in mind.

First, I sought to end the Era of the Great Non-Reading of Beloved.

Second, I wanted to symbolically spit in the eye of the plague of book banning.

The third purpose was the most important. I'd just read a Washington Post article¹ about the TikTok-fueled trend of bibliophiles annotating their books — underlining favorite quotes, scribbling comments in the margins, indexing key passages and such. Carefully curated annotation kits can now be found on Etsy, and how-to-annotate videos on Instagram.

Trendiness tends to send me fleeing in the other direction, but reading about this trend triggered sudden excitement — a compulsion to dive into a piece of literature of consequence with a pen and highlighter at hand. That's how I used to read back when I reviewed books² for a living, and I had better, deeper reading experiences than I've had more recently.

Sudden impulses can lead a person astray, of course. Ask anyone who is halfway through repainting a bedroom. But this impulse led me back home, to the holy practice of conversing with the author, before Good Reads started urging me to read moremoremore and my cell phone became a permanent part of my anatomy.

At its best, literature can amplify whatever level of innate empathy the reader brings to it, offering visceral insight into others' experiences. But it only works if we are fully engaged.

I speak from experience when I say that skimming a page and a half every night before the Ambien kicks in disrespects the story and the paper it's printed on. It has cheated me out of that miracle that reading makes possible: living one's own life and a character's life at the same time. What the annotation article did was remind me that I already knew a way to be much more intentional about book reading.

Which brings us back to Beloved, which you have no doubt read³, but which also bears rereading.

Morrison's singular novel is a celebration of craft in service to an extraordinary story — ghost story? Gothic tale? — about a formerly enslaved woman, Sethe, who is living free in Cincinnati in 1873 but is haunted by the child she lost when the Fugitive Slave Act unleashed horrors upon her family. Beloved is the name on the child's headstone, the engraving of which Sethe pays for with her body. Beloved is the ghost who creates mischief in the home Sethe shares with her daughter Denver at 124 Bluestone Road.

And Beloved is the name of the woman who walks out of the water one day and into that house, setting in motion a reckoning with the past and its most painful memories.

The narrative could have crumbled into cheap melodrama. Morrison elevated it to art with her command of language and historic details.

Among the many passages my annotating pen found worthwhile was this one, from a scene in which an old acquaintance approaching Sethe's house begins to hear voices that he can't quite make out:

When he got to the steps, the voices drained suddenly to less than a whisper. It gave him pause. They had become an occasional mutter — like the interior sounds a woman makes when she believes she is alone and unobserved at her work: a sth when she misses the needle's eye; a soft moan when she sees another chip in her one good platter; the low, friendly argument with which she greets the hens. Nothing fierce or startling. Just that eternal, private conversation that takes place between women and their tasks.

Not counting what I did to retype those sentences, I've probably read that passage five times for the pure pleasure of the words and their ability to evoke memories of my mother and grandmother engaged in conversations with themselves when they believed they were alone with a task.

It's funny how such details support the sense of truth inside a work of fiction, isn't it? Throwaway literature seldom achieves such feats, but the good stuff is packed with it.

That's why, in addition to annotating, I dedicated myself to taking my own sweet time with this one; to rereading portions or whole chapters if my rabbit brain had wandered the first time.

Computers and cell phones have turned me into a skimmer. Slowing down allows the story to stick, so that in six months, when I'm thinking back on the time I spent with this wonderful writer and her characters, I might recall more than just a sense of whether or not I liked the book. You know that feeling, right? My book club friends laugh about it sometimes. "I know I read and liked it, but I can't remember anything about it."

Going slow elevates reading beyond superficial information-gathering and creates cinema of the imagination. Only then, I think, does a good book have a shot at becoming part of us, in the way God and struggling writers intend.

Yes, Beloved is that indelible.

So, too, incidentally, is my marginalia. I understand that the very idea of marking up books causes some folks to shudder. But I've never understood the need to keep a book in pristine condition. I feel the same way about dog-eared pages and jotted notes as I do about crow's feet and gray hair. They are marks of experience. They all say, "life happened here, and it was good."

Hopefully, they denote time well spent and tales well told. It doesn't get better than that.

Egads, footnotes? Really?

Yes, really!

1. Here's a gift link to that Washington Post article.

2. I had the pleasure of serving as book review editor at The Plain Dealer for five years in the late 90s and early 2000s.

3. Or maybe you have seen the movie, which starred Oprah and Danny Glover, although I have not.