How Michael Dirda reviews a book:
While reading and browsing, I gradually accumulate notes and anecdotes and facts and even “thoughts”, all of which are duly set down in one of those bound composition notebooks with black-and-white speckled covers. To mark key passages I pencil vertical lines in the margins of that week’s “uncorrected page proofs”, those preliminary versions of new books with generic green, light blue, or cranberry covers. Sometimes I’ll scribble an idea on the endpapers, or make a list of pages to refer back to. In every way possible, I contrive to make my encounter with a book a relatively slow, deliberative enterprise, one during which I look for the salient arguments, linger over the author’s style, take issue with his conclusions or storytelling. My goal, that of all good book reviewers, indeed of all good readers, is the one expressed in Henry James’ celebrated dictum, “Try to be one on whom nothing is lost.”
From page xvi of his Bound to Please: An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education: Essays on Great Writers and Their Books, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2005.
My problem, such as it is, is that when I do make notes on what I’m reading, I jot them down somewhere and lose them. What would happen if I was more careful and systematic about this?