Raven kings and tarot cards

Today Maggie Stiefvater posted about The Raven King and gave me all kinds of a need to reread the books again. I'm trying to stay away from rereading at the moment, since I have so many new books to catch up on. Just this weekend, I bought The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer, The Rook by Daniel O'Malley, and The Ruby Circle by Richelle Mead. I've had my eye on The Rook for ages - like three years or so - and I figured it was time to suck it up and take a look. I've also been toying around with The Art of Asking for a while, and well, The Ruby Circle just came out. And I have to find out what happens to Adrien and Sydney.

So no Raven boys for me right now. Maybe over Trin Days, or Spring Break.

However, I was inspired by Maggie Stiefvater this semester to create my own tarot deck based on my thesis a.k.a. TA, as the project for my Concepts and Processes class. After doing a bunch of sketches, I've finally done the first two cards: The Lovers, and Strength. I will post them at some point maybe.

I've been steadily working on TA, with lots of help from my advisor in the form of creating a timeline and summary. I never thought I'd find it useful, but it's actually one of the things that's propelling me forward right now.

The snow is still here. It was a balmy 4C today and we were all wondering why we were so warm. Makes me wish it would get a little warmer still.

Marginalia

I went to a talk yesterday in the rare books library at my uni, which was mostly about 19th Century publishers, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. At some point, however, the conversation diverted to marginalia (notes written in the margins, in case anyone's wondering) and its disappearance. I wasn't aware of this, but apparently historians learn a lot about responses to books from the marginalia. Other than professional reviews, there wasn't an outlet for reader's responses, so many of them wrote down their thoughts in the book itself.

Now I know this is a divided issue, but my books are pristine. I have my name and year in the front, but other than that, nothing. I don't even dog ear my books anymore. If I have thoughts about a book, most of the time, they stay that way, unless I write a review on Goodreads or here. To me, a book is precious as an object.

However, this presents its own problems. Historians are having a really hard time figuring out how to preserve and document information on the internet. We don't know in five hundred years if we'll still have access to the internet, and so it seems like there should be a back-up plan. There are universities that put all of their digital records onto microfilm, but that sounds inconvenient and time consuming. Do we print out everything? Where do we store it? How do you even begin recording something so large? At the moment, there's no surefire solution.

So why don't we write more in our books? They're cheaper and more available than they've ever been. They're equally disposable, too.  Doug Dorst and J. J. Abrams played around with marginalia in S. and it's simply fascinating to read. Couldn't marginalia be part of the reading experience, too?

Me? I personally don't know. After that conversation, I'm thinking about recording more of my thoughts in my books. I would like to have a record of how I felt at this exact point at this particular time. But I'd also like to come to a book with clean, legible pages. I like to reread a book knowing that I'm coming to it with fresh eyes, especially if I've forgotten the plot.

Anyway, I'm curious. Thoughts? Comments? I'd love to know your opinions on marginalia and how it affects the reading experience.