"Reading, if one is reading properly, is to think"

"There is, within every reader worth the ink spilled in his direction, an impulse both criminal and holy: to scrawl and to deface the pristine margins of a book with the unruly evidence of thought. We call this annotation, ... the very gesture by which a book is rescued from the museum glass of mere consumption and dragged, kicking and screaming, into the flickering present of a mind alive with questions.
    "Reading, if one is reading properly, is to think, and thought, unruly thing that it is, resists containment. It overflows and demands articulation. If it is not spoken, it will be written. And so, the margins—those innocent blank expanses to the right and to the left—become battlefields, sites of interrogation, where the reader takes up the pen not as a scribe but as a conspirator. Here, in the tight scrawl of a half-formed argument, in the underlined passage thick with silent agreement, in the snide rebuttal penciled next to an author’s pronouncement, is evidence of that most radical act: the refusal to simply receive. The marked book is the thought-through book, the wrestled-with book, the book taken apart and reconstructed in the mind of its reader."

~ Michael S. Rose from his post 'The Subversive Art of Annotation' [hat tip Carrie-Ann Biondi]