Tools of the Trade: The Bookmark

Ah, the bookmark. This can be anything: a humble scrap of paper, bank notes (I once found a $20 bill in the Lord of the Rings), airplane ticket stubs, toilet paper (don’t lie, if you’re reading this blog, you’ve probably done that), or on rare occasions your iPad mini (oops). What makes the bookmark a tool of the trade? Well, obviously you can use it to mark your place in a book when you stop midway through. But on a deeper level it signifies a reading philosophy.

Some readers often have 5-6 books going at one time. Some readers will chip away at one book, chapter by chapter, a little before bed each night. I can’t do either of those things. My brain isn’t capable of switching between different storylines and plots (though I can occasionally handle a non-fiction and fiction book at the same time) and after seven years of marriage my husband just rolls his eyes when I say I’m going to read “for just a little bit” before bed, as this inevitably turns into me finishing the book at three in the morning – and I don’t even have to like it. I get sucked into the story and just can’t stop, unless the book is truly horrible, and even then I generally need to know how it ends.

I have always, always been a sit down and read a whole book kind of girl. Now that I have a young son, and my husband is working a more traditional schedule (i.e. he’s not gone for whole-book lengths of time after our baby goes to sleep), I just don’t have the time to do that anymore. It’s either read a little at a time, or not at all. So I’m trying to train myself to be a bookmark user. If I can’t make myself stop in the middle of a book, I’m either looking at very short nights or not reading. Neither of those options appeal to me. At all.

So today I’m raising up the bookmark as not only a tool of the trade, but as a representation of the brave new world of reading in small doses.

Do you use bookmarks? How many books are you generally reading at once? What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever used as a bookmark?