Golden Notebook, Week 1

The online Golden Notebook project began yesterday, and so far there is marginalia added for about the first 100 pages. They are planning to read around 100 pages a week, and so the project will run for 5-6 weeks. The seven women participating write their comments "in the margins" of the online text (so you can read along there quite easily), but there are also then forums in which everyone can discuss both Lessing's text and the comments posted. So far I've only read 50 pages in my 1973 edition (pictured here) so perhaps I will find something to say about the first section of the book...for the moment I'd like to share with you a wonderful quote from Lessing's own introduction to the book:

There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice-versa. Don’t read a book out of its right time for you.