I use one of three different methods when I read a book. I may pick up a book, read it, then set it aside; or I may read it with a stack of business cards handy, and jam one between any pages where I find something of interest; or sometimes I'll sit down with a dictionary and Cliff's Notes, and really try to get something from the book. It all depends on how much time I want to spend. Usually, I use the second method so I can go back and quickly find the good parts. This is particularly handy if I've set a book aside a little too long. Many times I'm reading two or three books concurrently, and method number two helps me quickly refresh my memory. Method number three takes a long time, so I save that for something really special; number one is the quickest, but I never know what parts of the book are going to stick.
So I'm driving into work Tuesday listening to my new favorite radio station, and a song comes on where the writer has rhymed write and right. I shan't 'ave noticed, save for that book I just read. You see Amory and his Girl had a bit of a row because she wrote a poem rhyming see with sea; and he didn't think it sporting to use homonyms that way. It's so weird that I would hear that in a song and think, "You can't do that - F. Scott Fitzgerald said so!" What's even stranger is that I would remember such an insignificant part of the book at all. I read it using method one; then I gave the book away when I was finished reading it. Why - of all things in the book - should I remember that, when I can't even remember his girlfriend's name?
So that got me to wondering: What is the longest coherent sentence - or paragraph for that matter - which can by constructed from paired homonyms. I made up a four word forward as the title to this post (I crack myself up sometimes); but I'm sure someone can do a lot better than that. I've seen the longest palindrome in the Guinness Book of World Records and it's unbelievable. Anybody care to give this a try?
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I think it makes perfect sense that you remember that bit and not the character's name. You remembered a concept. Be impressed that you remembered the author! As for the reading methods, I either use your first method if it's a light read or a version of your other two which is, I take a piece of paper, jot down anything that I either want to remember including a page number, or a word I don't know the meaning of (also including a page number). Sometimes I have just a few notes and sometimes I have many. This works well when it's a book for my book group because then I can share some of the things I found interesting. I have a terrible memory so if I don't jot them down, I will usually forget. Now for what I do with the notes, if I own the book, I leave the notes in the book. This is nice because I can re-open the book anytime later and get a quick summary of the parts I found most noteworthy. If I don't own the book (library or borrowed), the notes go floating around my house with all the other random scraps of paper. Guess I should start a file or something.
ReplyDeleteI'm not good at this homonym game but I did find this online - it's a song by Dan Crow for kids.
Homonyms
I saw Jim
In the gym
I heard him
Sing a hymn
Have you ever heard
A cattle herd?
For words like that
There is a word
"Refrain:
They're called homonyms"
Not antonyms
Not synonyms
I'm talking about homonyms
"I was weak
For an entire week"
'Til I got to meet
A piece of meat
Then I ate
At a little past eight
The cheese I grate
It tasted great
Refrain
One won. Eight ate two too, for four. That's mine. Not borrowed. Okay, it's not beautiful but it's something.
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