My first exposure to critical reading was college and I remember it well. We were to sit in class and read Gerontium by T. S. Eliot. At the end of the first class we might have gotten through the first page and it was the most labor I had put into a single printed page. And so begins the first challenge: reading the introduction when you want to read the book. The next challenge is to maintain a cohesive mental picture of the story while making excursions into the notes.

The notes are enlightening but I wish I had a separate compartment in my brain were I could store these notes so that when I closed the compartment I had no knowledge of them. This is the difficulty I have with critical reading of annotated books. I’ll get over it.