On Writing in Books

5 Reasons in Favor, and a Poem

One of the more polarizing topics in the bookish world is whether or not you ought to mark up a book. Some cover the pages they read with underlines, comments, and symbols. Others are strongly against marginalia, preferring to keep their books carefully clean and pristine. Despite the many strong opinions, I think many of us fall in between the two extremes, underlining and commenting in the margins on occasion but saving some favorite copies to be kept clear and beautiful. Regardless of your stance, it can be fun to hear the defense of marginalia. Over on Miller’s Book Review, Joel Miller shared 5 Reasons to Write in Your Books. The whole article is great, but I especially enjoyed his 2nd reason:

Related to memory, writing in your books helps you access the state of mind you were in when you experienced a particular text. We all read in contexts. We have certain arguments going on at one time and not others; we have issues we’re grappling with unique to those times and places.

Ideas run in streams peculiar to the moment. And once the moment passes—and how it influenced your reading and thinking—it’s gone. All those scribbles and scratches serve as a means for documenting that singular context. The more thorough your note-taking, the more beneficial later on.

The risk here is that you may go back and find yourself embarrassed by your earlier observations. You might see how you were going down a bogus track when you last read Such and Such by So and So. You might cringe at an opinion you once held. Happens to me all the time. But! You may also find truly valuable insights you’ve now lost.

This is something I find very true in my reading life. Many times I draw connections and new ideas from a book in direct connection with something happening in my own life, or perhaps the other books I’m reading at the same time. If I don’t write down my thoughts, at least with a quick note, I often forget them by the time I go back to reread a passage. Even if I simply underline a passage I can forget the reason for underlining if I do not write down a quick note as well. And yes: the embarrassment at some of those thoughts and connections is very real. But it keeps us all humble, I suppose! And there is something to be said for finding your old scribbles while rereading a book and seeing that you’ve grown in your thinking and understanding since then.

What’s more, it is a delight sometimes to buy used books and find other people’s scribbles inside. It feels as if you can get to know that previous owner a little better just by the type of writing they do: underling? highlighting? long comments in the margins? A simple haha on occasion? Rarely have I ever been disappointed to find a few scribbles in a book.

Billy Collins wrote a delightful poem on the topic, aptly titled Marginalia, and I’d like to end with that poem. But I’d also love to hear from you: are you team marginalia?

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you
,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O’Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive –
“Nonsense.” “Please!” “HA!!” –
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
who wrote “Don’t be a ninny”
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls “Metaphor” next to a stanza of Eliot’s.
Another notes the presence of “Irony”
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
hands cupped around their mouths.
“Absolutely,” they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
“Yes.” “Bull’s-eye.” “My man!”
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written “Man vs. Nature”
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird singing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page–
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake’s furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents’ living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

a few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil–
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet–
“Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”