A Preservationist Has Been Converted.

I recently read The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life by Steve Leveen.  It was a little dull of a read, frankly.  Seriously, reading about reading?  Yeah, right.  However, I did feel inspired about how I am conducting my own little Well-Read Life and was pleased to see that I already do many of the things he recommended.  I do keep a shelf of "candidates" in my home in a designated areas around our house and I keep a list of books on my Treo as I come across them while I am out and about.  I keep a list of the books I have read by using Goodreads.com - a site I highly recommend for all book aficionados. I belong to a spectacular book club - seriously one of the best I have to which I have ever belonged - this club has really expanded my reading horizons and I come away from each meeting inspired.  And finally, the author recommends not rushing to put a book back on the shelf immediately after reading it, he recommends savoring it for awhile, maybe revisiting a few pages.  He recommends just sitting for awhile and thinking about the book.  This something I often do after having read a good book - I just sit back and relish my favorite parts.

The author also talks about Footprint Leavers and Preservationists.  Footprint Leavers dog-ear pages and write in the margins of pages.  Preservationists leave no marks on books.  I am a Preservationist - except for textbooks in college, I rarely write in books.  Sometimes, I will dog-ear pages so that I can refer to them later, but in general, I try to use Post-It notes.

However.

I am currently reading The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It by Robyn O'Brien.  I checked this book out from the library, but I realized within 20 pages I would simply need to own this book for myself.  I also realized that I was going to need to reform my Preservationist ways.  So, I purchased one of those fancy Post-It Notes highlighters with the built-in Notes dispenser. I am still uncomfortable marking up this book, but there is such important information contained in it, I want to be sure I do not forget it.  Also,  I want to write a proper review of it here when I have finished it.  This book is life-changing for me and I want to help pass the message that our food supply is corrupted.  In short, this book is holding proofs regarding some things I have been concerned about for years  -- trans fats, high fructose corn syrup and most recently, artificial food colorings, which affect Arun in serious, negative ways.  He becomes an entirely different little boy when he consumes artificial food colorings.

Folks, I will be marking the hell out of this book.