Keeping track

Reading long novels in PDF format is a chore. You are tied to your computer and, furthermore, Adobe Reader doesn't allow you to create your own bookmarks. At most, it can reopen a document at the same place you left it the last time, but that's hardly a substitute. Go back a few pages to check something, and you'll need to find your way again. INCONVENIENT!

I had to resort to the crude meatspace practice of writing in a notebook the numbers of the pages at which I stopped reading. This is cumbersome, and besides cumbersome I feel it is inelegant, to track your progress across a complex tapestry of words with something as prosaic and brutally matter-of-fact as a string of numbers.

So now what I do is to copy some singular phrase and later use the search funcion to locate it. It's a bit more work, but if feels right. Plus, now when I finish a novel I get a little dadaist poem as a bonus. The last phrase in my notebook is currently "the slow growth and change of rite and dogma like his own rare thoughts, a chemistry of stars".

For physical books, the absolute best way to keep track would be to rip and burn each page once you have read it. It's the same for the book of your life: the past exist nowhere, and your memories are just the ashes of burnt days.

And, when dealing with the all-important genre of bathroom literature, already read pages can have other uses. Although that would create an odd link between speed reading and diarrhea.