Browsing through a used bookstore a few weeks ago, I [Rebecca] came across mysterious handwritten notes in Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk. These notes were written not in the margins, but between lines of text. Not only that, they weren’t about the book-they looked more like a poem. Had someone grabbed this book in the dark, thinking it was a notebook? Or, was the poem doing a duet with Annie Dillard?

Marks that readers leave behind them are cryptic signs of a solitary activity. Recently, through various web sites, readerly note-taking has become more communal. BookGlutton is one new manifestation, and Jenni and I decided to explore it. Here, we discuss our experience of reading the Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters on BookGlutton.com (our respective online personas are “librarydork” and “jennilovesbooks“).

Jenni Simmons: Where did you hear about BookGlutton? Do you consider yourself a book glutton? (I am.) What piqued your interest in the web site?

Rebecca Tirrell Talbot: All Things Considered featured BookGlutton and since you can chat about books and leave public notes, it seemed the site would change one of my favorite activities from solitary to social. What fun!

I am absolutely a book glutton. A day that begins with coffee and reading is pure luxury. On the other hand, isn’t it odd that readers give themselves such self-deprecating nicknames-worm and glutton? Maybe we believe that books are so good, they transform worms and gluttons into noble things.

Rebecca: How do you generally go about reading a book? What changed when you began to read on BookGlutton? Was it the same as what you had anticipated?

Jenni: I make a cup of coffee or tea. I prefer reading in the soft armchair in my living room, or in bed (often too late at night). I will never need Prozac as long as I have good books. I’m not into dog-earing pages; I use one or two bookmarks. Lately, I’ve been disciplining myself to take notes in a Moleskine with my favorite pen. I like to read in peace and quiet, but my notes are a chaotic mess, so I’m relieved to strap shut the sleek black notebook.

Using BookGlutton made reading less of an escape and more of a studious experience, which is not bad at all. Reading relaxes me, but I want to learn and grow as well. And I didn’t take the Spoon River Anthology to bed. I don’t have a Kindle (yet), and my MacBook is not the same light tactile experience as a well-worn paperback.

I wasn’t sure what to expect – I’ve never taken part in a book club, though I plan to start one soon. So at first I had public note-taking anxiety, but then I eased into it with confidence. I realized that although my note-taking is not a perfect art, my thoughts are valid, and brain fodder for my writing. And seeing your thoughts next to mine challenged and sharpened my perceptions of Masters’s poems.

Used by Permission

Jenni: Do you normally take notes while reading? Do you write in a notebook, on the book’s pages, or elsewhere? Do you think note-taking helps you understand the book better? What about writers such as ourselves – should we always take notes? Is there a balance?

Rebecca: If I own the book, I take notes, bend the spine, fold corners, write cross-references and underline. Some might see this as desecration; I see it as my journey. I guess it’s like hiking-the more strenuous the journey, the more likely that future travelers will know I’ve been there. Notes are like my campfires and shelters, my machete paths through the brambles. Later on, I don’t always see the notes as helpful-my college books are full of observations like “awesome description” or (horror of horrors) random smiley-faces-but I do think that the process of taking notes helps me make a book my own.

Is it important for writers to take notes? That’s a great question. It’s essential for writers to understand and process what other writers are up to, but whether that involves carrying the work around in your head or desecrating pages is very personal.

Rebecca: What are your thoughts about making reading into a more social experience?

Jenni: Reading is somewhat like any art form: it begins with a person in solitude, taking in the words, their imagination creating the visuals. But I think it must become a social encounter – whether that means reading aloud to your spouse, joining or starting a book club, or more modern socializing through a venue such as BookGlutton. The web site flashes a phrase on the main page: “Books are conversations.” Just as the author converses with the reader through the book, we ought to further that conversation from reader to reader like wildfire.

Jenni: Have you ever led a book club, or read a book with another person? Does BookGlutton give enough of the true discussion experience – learning from each other’s insight, and so on?

Rebecca: My MFA program at Roosevelt University was a lively literary community and had a book club feel. Now that it’s over, a book club would enrich my life. BookGlutton might provide that. I learned a ton from your insight into Spoon River. If only BookGlutton could also provide wine and baked goods, it would be a perfect book club!

Rebecca: Who do you think this site is most suited for? Who would you recommend it to?

Jenni: Because using BookGlutton requires having a computer, it requires at least a little technical savvy to enjoy. It’s perfect for people like you and me who live in different states, but want to discuss books with each other. And it is great for friends who, even though they may live in the same city, have busy schedules. They could enjoy a book club of sorts on their lunch break, or while winding down at night in their home.

Jenni: Would you recommend BookGlutton to your students?

Rebecca: Yes! I plan to. It will give them a perfect learning community outside of class.

Jenni: Do you read a lot of books electronically? If so, which devices do you use? Did you enjoy reading the Spoon River Anthology on BookGlutton? Did you find it easy to navigate and take electronic notes?

Rebecca: Spoon River Anthology and The Autobiography of Saint Ignatius are the only books I’ve ever read online (the latter on Project Gutenberg). A clunky laptop is my only electronic reading device! Reading on BookGlutton wasn’t as relaxing as lazing about on the couch, but it made me feel like I was just doing some light reading even though Edgar Lee Masters’ poems are amazing and profound. It was so easy to keep clicking onto the next page! I’m guessing this feeling of “light reading” is something Travis Alber and Aaron Miller, BookGlutton’s creators, foster on purpose. Text is nicely sized with ample white space.

Rebecca: What suggestions do you have for BookGlutton when they move out of their beta version? What did you find most enjoyable about this version?

Jenni: I had to Google for background information to the Spoon River Anthology, so I recommend lengthy synopses and introductions to each book, to let users do all of their reading on the BookGlutton site. I hope they expand their selection soon – I hunted high and low for some of my favorite authors to no avail. It would be lovely to be able to edit my previously posted comments, too. Oh, and an iPhone app would make reading on BookGlutton easier and more portable.

Free books are very enjoyable to me. You hand me a good, free book, and I’m a happy gal. The flip side to a smaller selection of books on BookGlutton is that you and I discovered a literary masterpiece about which I didn’t know much. My favorite technical features are the ability to embed the book on a web site, and e-mail the book to another bibliophile. It’s kind of like a virtual library, except no late fees!

Jenni: I’ve never read this kind of “fictional poetry” genre such as Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. Have you read anything like it? Did you end up liking this book? Who were some of your favorite voices from the grave in Spoon River, Illinois?

Rebecca: I know there are others out there and I should read them, because I love it when writers challenge the boundaries of genre. So, I guess that’s a clue that I liked Spoon River!

Favorite voices? Trainor, the Druggist, who commented on combustible relationships; Nellie Clark and Pauline Barrett, whose stories are devastating; Mrs. Williams, the milliner, who advises women that a nice hat has saved many a marriage; Lucinda Matlock, Masters’s fictionalized version of his grandmother.

Rebecca: In many ways, I found Spoon River Anthology to be a dark work: gritty to the point of being bleak, honest to the point where it was sometimes quite wrenching. Did you find the same thing? If so, did you also see aspects of it that were beautiful or even redemptive?

Jenni: Yes. Though Masters’s writing is beautiful and evocative, it was depressing to read too many poems in a row. I had to ingest them slowly due to the dark, bitter narratives. I literally craved redemption, forgiveness, and kindness in a small town of murders, broken marriages, and false accusations. But within their collective voice, lights do shine in the darkness, such as Emily Sparks praying for her student, Reuben Pantier, and writing him a letter “of the beautiful love of Christ.” Reading the Proverb-like contrast of epitaphs – both the wise and foolish – also got me to thinking: How do I live my life? What do I hope to say from my own grave to my spouse, my family, my neighbors?

As Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” The residents of the fictional Spoon River, Illinois are a literary reminder to live and love well, and be grateful for my life – for all I have been given.

Like so many love affairs, this one began in a quiet café near the Seine in Paris. Unlike those others, this was not the chance meeting of two wanderlust strangers, eyes dancing over the top of books not being read. Nor the dreamy gaze that follows a handsome patron’s catching a falling waitress, nor even a random conversation uniting two souls’ destinies. It wasn’t like any of those. In fact, it wasn’t with a person at all.

This café was the kind of place where famous authors famously sat to write famous novels before their infamous demise. And at a small table tucked away by windows peering over rustic streets, their glass dripping toward Notre Dame, I was baptized. Not into the church, not into prose, but into the complex, the complicated, the rich and robust world of coffee. A world that, even just an hour earlier, I would have declared I could unapologetically avoid.

How I had hated coffee. The look, the smell, the feel, the taste. I hated everything about it as long as I can remember hating anything about beverages or foodstuffs. Roasted, dried, mocha-fied. In chocolate, in ice cream, in liquor, in anything. Hated it.

For a time I tried to quaff in the culture of coffee drinkers. A fast-paced and productive culture carefully groomed to maintain an intellectual appearance I so wanted to have. Alas, my excursions there left nothing but bitter tastes in my mouth. I preferred the shame and humiliation of that timeless winter classic – hot chocolate – whilst my peers (or so I thought, though I doubt they reciprocated as I chugged my Neapolitan-Lacto-Choco-Blast) savored sophisticated java.

I confess I have a compulsive need to both fit in wherever I find myself, and stand out as an individual thinker. A popular outcast, if you will. A free, group-thinker. To be in the crowd, but not of the crowd. I’ve always hated that feeling of being outside the circle; of looking through glass at happy diners and their culinary delicacies while trapped on the green searching for an entrance and running from self doubt’s demon-dog.

(As you scrape your memory for the preceding 80s blockbuster movie reference, I’ll add that it was that very compulsion that helped me turn the corner.)

Just after touchdown on my first trip to Paris, I found myself jaw-dropped, nose and cheek pressed against the glass, gawking at fashionable, thin smokers sitting and sipping . . . coffee. Though I bore a cocoa brown HC on my palate for years, self-conciousness was not about to commit the international traveler’s cardinal sin of being from America and looking like it. You know the people of whom I speak: the guy wearing the ridiculously huge, clearly inflatable and blinding red Kansas City Chiefs jacket in the Louvre, or that family with the matching sneakers, squeaking their nikadidasumas all over the floor where Napoleon was wedded to Josephine.

How a culture consumes its coffee says perhaps more than anything else about what it means to be a part of that culture. And I was more than desperate to fit into it. So as my wife and I entered the café, I fully intended on ordering (mega gulp) coffee.

One hurdle remained: I didn’t know anything meaningful about coffee and now I was about to order some in a global capitol of coffee drinking. My infantile language skills, barely good enough to make out a few words on le menu, didn’t help slow the adrenaline coursing through my body, heightening my awareness that I had no idea what the hell I was doing there, and urging me to leap out of the chair, spring for the door and slam a coke somewhere (which is noticeably more refreshing in Europe thanks to the absence of high fructose corn syrup – a topic for another occasion). Being French, the server arrived at our table an excruciating fifteen minutes after we sat our jet-lagged derrières. Watching his lips allow the escape of sounds, which brought none of a year of college French to mind, I assumed I ought to order. I spoke two words with a frogginess that at least might have given him the impression that I, too, was a chain smoker. Two lip-licking, luscious words that would be the beginning of my romance with coffee.

Just two tiny French words. Café Crème.

Mmm, how they roll off the tongue, like Proust. Café Crème. I often dream of that moment and literally taste again for the first time what it means to be French. A culture exclusively renowned for culture; a culture that savors every slow sip of its café. The French don’t order café to go and then consume this beverage while prancing, meandering, striding or pounding the pavement on their way to anywhere. On the contrary they will order a coffee, and sit, and drink. They just drink, simply for the pleasure of the experience. No thought of productivity, no obsessions about meetings or agenda items. Only coffee and croissant and desgustation. If no where else in the world, in France, doing “nothing” is doing something.

Ironically, the trip left me quite cynical (since after one week I was now an expert on all things café) about coffee culture in the U.S., believing that we were beyond repentance. Taking the time to stop and enjoy such a multi-sensory experience like a cup of coffee is a thing long lost in America. Thus we have awful coffee. In our big-box, mega-conglomerate, profit-minded, market-driven food culture, we’ve devalued experiences of the wonderful and new because we are conditioned to favor the familiar. Two full generations have come and gone immersed in this paradigm and we’ve lost the tools and palate for sensory adventure or even simple appreciation.

But it’s not too late to once again smell new aromas and taste flavors that truly demand attention and reflection. My grandfather – a man of the last generation not reared on rampant consumerism and homogenization of taste – with a single cup o’ joe, gave me hope.

Before I left for to visit my grandparents in Florida, I dreaded what coffee I might imbibe. Would it be the diner sludge so many daily tolerate not realizing the universe of unfathomable flavor just outside their cup? Would it be the thrice-reused grounds and swill that is New York City street vendor coffee? Starbucks? Those are almost all the choices these days. Though many good local coffee shops brew in college towns and quaint, old downtowns, they are not the standard bearers of coffee culture this side of the Atlantic.

The first morning, Grandpa rose with the sun and had completed eight sudoku before eyes had rolled from the back of my head. Dragging myself to kitchen to endure whatever was about to pass for coffee, I found Grandpa in the kitchen with a burlap sack of raw green Guatemalan coffee beans, carefully shoveling scoops into a jet black coffee roaster, equipped with a small catalytic converter to quell the smoke that would otherwise coat the kitchen when roasting coffee beans at home. One has many expectations before a trip to Florida, both good and bad, but homemade, fresh-roasted coffee was not one. Yet there I was with a rich and bold mug of black coffee, cradled in hand on a dewy Ocala winter’s morn that I could not have had anywhere else in the world.

That is beauty. I can’t say it rivaled the seduction of a café crème. But I can say it was a delicious and unique adventure, a special opportunity to broaden my experiences – to have hot water that’s dripped over ground, burnt beans change my worldview.

It reminded me there exists an ocean of new experiences waiting for us to reject the notion that what we already know and like is what is unquestionably best – waiting for us to indeed question, to ask ourselves if we’re merely habitual creatures unwittingly shaped by consumerism. Have I settled for rotten and ubiquitous fallen fruit when the door to the garden of delights is wide open beckoning me to come in, look up and taste the world that ought to be? A world that will be.

It’s sad that what drove me out of my shallow preferences was an improbable mixture of vanity and self-consciousness. What is brilliant is that it was my grandfather – a man categorized with those stereotyped as unmovable and stuck in their ways – who embraced an epicurean adventure that taught me, so can we all. So say we all.