50 Things to Collect when you Read

This post has since been reposted by Thought Catalog

  1. Favorite quotes
  2. Gorgeous prose
  3. Bad prose
  4. Lines that make you laugh
  5. and cry
  6. Lines you wish you had written
  7. Scenes that make you wonder how the hell this book got so popular
  8. Place names
  9. Character names
  10. Obscure words (the word for a collector of words is sesquipedalian)
  11. Words you derive the meaning of from their context
  12. Moments when you know what will happen next
  13. Moments where you thought you knew and were surprised
  14. Moments that made you put the book down
  15. Where you were, who you were with, what was going on around you while you were reading (See Proust, Swan’s Way)
  16. Recommended further reading.
  17. Settings
  18. Drinks mentioned
  19. Drugs mentioned
  20. Number of drinks taken (This has been done by readers of  The Sun Also Rises, and in a British Medical Journal study of the James Bond novels and films.)
  21. Bad sex scenes. (The Literary Review puts out an award every year for bad sex in fiction.)
  22. Language that just wouldn’t fly today (again, see Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.
  23. Lines that will make you sound smart.
  24. Feelings you’ve had your whole life you’re only just finding the words for in someone else’s work
  25. Words of comfort
  26. Words that disturb
  27. Words a good friend needs to hear right now
  28. Moments that make you say “I could have thought of that”
  29. References to historical/ current events. (I recently found a scene in Watchmen based on an obscure and brutal prison riot in New Mexico, the details of which I DO NOT recommend Googling.)
  30. References to other works of literature and art
  31. Outright theft of other works of art
  32. The sources of later references
  33. Parallels and cross pollination to other stuff you’re reading
  34. Moments that make you see the limits of verbal storytelling
  35. and moments that make you believe there are no limits
  36. Questions for the author
  37. Questions for a character
  38. Questions for yourself, the reader
  39. Food mentioned
  40. Brand names
  41. Celebrities and historical figures name-dropped
  42. Scenes that were better/ worse in the movie
  43. What you liked
  44. What you hated
  45. Notes on an impossible sequel
  46. Who you’d cast in the movie
  47. Life lessons
  48. Songs mentioned
  49. Books mentioned
  50. Number of times a given word appears (David Foster Wallace does a hilarious take-down of John Updike in which compares the number of words devoted to the description of a golf course to the very few words describing the end of the world for which the course is a metaphor.)

 

This post started as a brainstorming session with The Imperfectionist.