I read a lot. I love to read. I often blow through a book just taking it in happily and moving on. Is this way my reading is like a meal. Many meals are good, but as it’s something I do three times a day, eating is often enjoyable but often not worth noting, not good enough to drop into long term memory. I have a hard enough time remembering names I really want to remember to start worrying about a good breakfast I had on April 12 of some year.
But I love the idea of intentionally savoring things. Sometimes it is a meal – when the magical combination of food, company, and feelings conspire to make eating feel magical. I’m thinking of giant beans in Istanbul. I’m thinking of cornichon pickles in my parent’s kitchen in Douglasville, GA. I’m thinking of my husband’s grandmother’s lemon pie on a particular visit to Ossining, NY. I’m thinking of moments when time seemed to pause and the savoring happened.
I started to ponder this with books after a post from Daniel Pink about destroying your books. I tried his tip of writing in my books and couldn’t do it. Not only because I don’t even break the spine of a book when I read it, it also felt like too much of a distraction from the flow of the author’s words. Highlights felt hard to find later and how much to highlight? Sometimes it’s a quotable bit, sometimes a paragraph or entire section I want to come back to. I found highlighting book tape (post it style see through strips) and that felt better – an easy way to quickly mark a think I wanted to come back to.
But what then? I finish a book with a bunch of tabs and then? I don’t feel called to keep most of my books and the vast majority are from the library… so annotating them this way is still just a temporary solution to a problem I couldn’t articulate until recently. I want to keep some of it, and while my brain may have integrated key parts of what I’ve read, I wanted to keep details I cared about – ideas, beautiful phrases, snippets.
Long ago (40 years ago?) I started to gather up little quotes I loved. Snippets from magazines and other sources. It was a delight when one day I put them into an old school photo album – the kind with the sticky sort of pages and the peel open and shut plastic to protect your photos (or quotes in my case). Now I had a way to keep ideas.
But life got busy and those early quotes came preprinted and in lovely fonts, ready to be noticed and kept. Cutting apart books wasn’t viable for me and so I was stuck with how to keep and savor and be able to find them so I would have a way to savor again later. Scribbling them here and there (or more often nowhere) was the best I did. Until recently.
Overwhelmed, and honestly a bit sad about it, I sought out something better. I came across many ideas and integrated two practices that are working for me. If they might work for you, feel free to adopt and adapt. If it seems cumbersome or otherwise ridiculous, then it isn’t for you and consider this an invitation to savor things in your own way(s).
First was the idea of bringing my many used up journals (mostly a5 or roughly half letter sided papers) with tons of notes, ideas, and book quotes scribbled across them into a more accessible (savorable) format. I discovered that this size exists in a multi ring binder (and matching dividers) so I cut my old journals up and sorted the now loose pages into a new single binder with a few key dividers. Yes, I had to rewrite some pages to make this work. Yes, it took me about two days to get it all set the way I wanted. One of the new notebook sections is for book quotes. Now when I finish a notable book, I take it to my current journal (which is a beautiful a5 sized one that has a small ring binder at its center so I don’t have to cut another journal apart in the future) and write down all the parts I want to keep. When I’m ready, I move those pages to the binder.
Second is the modern-day reading journal. I dug into this idea and thought maybe this was stupid or maybe this was yet another journal destined to be clutter, but two months in and I am officially in love. This one is what I have, and it gives 2 years of space (4 pages) to log all the books you read in a compact monthly list, a daily reading log check box page if you wish (I’m skipping this page for now) and then book review pages. Yes – I know if you feel like clicking the link you can see all of these pages, but I’m excited so I’m writing about it anyway. Now, seven weeks into the year (and having already read 19 books this year), I just completed my first book review and filled every inch of that two-page spread. It was the definition of savoring. It was a book I loved and one that inspired a LOT of thoughts, but I’m not looking to be a formal book reviewer or publish every thought and opinion I have. Instead, this feels like a private space to ponder the ideas and feelings a book left me with, an invitation to do it in a structured way. It’s a journal entry in which at the end of reading a magnificent book, I got to savor the book again. In a way, it feels like sharing a memory with a new friend, how you get to savor it again in the retelling. Except I think the friend is my future self, who might look back one day and say, “oh yes – I remember that feeling, I remember those thoughts.”
Both of these practices take time. But spending time and not rushing to the next thing is the core or savoring. Savoring isn’t rushing. It’s not getting through one more thing. It’s slowing down. Noticing. Mindful. Present. Curious.
I don’t write about every book, just like I don’t savor every meal. And yes – sometimes I go back to places I tagged with a strip of color and I don’t end up keeping the content. Perhaps it was presented in a way I liked better later, or maybe I feel like I got enough just by pausing in the moment to notice it. Savoring the words feels right. Revisiting the words in the way I first saw them feels right. Keeping the words and ideas (or not) in my own way feels right. It is the slowing down I think I was craving, acknowledging the written word as a sometimes art form that deserves a minute to simply BE with.
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“When you find something you really enjoy, do it slowly.”
Kevin Kelly
Journal Prompt: Take a minute to think about the last thing you really savored. A meal, a sip of coffee, a poem, the feeling of a soft sweater. Explore it in words, invoking as many of the five senses as you can recall being a part of it.
Physical Prompt: Select 1 minute each day for a small ritual of savoring. It could be as simple as mindfully moving through the five senses as you take a sip of coffee or tea (if that’s your thing) or making it a point to notice your yoga mat at the start of a practice, your car before you turn it on, your bed as you crawl in to sleep.
All content I share here, elsewhere on my websites and in social media is created by me, Alison Gurevich – and not AI or other sources unless otherwise specifically attributed. This includes all photographs, writing, and ideas. All rights reserved by Alison Gurevich. “How I Savor a Book” was originally published to www.breathtomotion.com on February 18, 2026. When you find typos or grammar errors, celebrate humanity and enjoy a little song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3wKzyIN1yk (Human by Rag N Bone Man).