Writing in Books

I went to a lecture recently about reading. There was a lot of discussion about annotation. Some people had strong feelings about whether they would/would not buy used books (text books) that were annotated and whether or not their decision would be influenced by whether the annotator was an A or a D student. There was talk about whether people remember the act of annotating or remember something because it was annotated.

However, when someone brought up annotation of fiction, many people seemed astonished (in a bad way). Apparently fiction is the Maginot Line of annotation. People seemed appalled by the very mention of it. I didn’t get the distinction; I thought everyone wrote in everything.

I have many of my mother’s books and many of them are fiction and many are annotated. Apparently I come from a long line of annotators, my grandmother also scribbled on everything she read (including the newspaper) and even made notes for herself on the dining room walls. Frustrated writers? Maybe. Eccentrics? Yes. Total reprobates? No, defiling a library book was out of the question. But writing in your own copy of Moby Dick – go for it.

At the time of the lecture I was reading one of my mother’s books. It was full of small notes and underlined sentences, and whether I understood them or not, the annotations, more than the book itself, were giving me great pleasure. I can’t claim to know why my mom noted what she did; why some things deserved exclamation points and others question marks; but I have a pretty good idea what YES!!! means next to an underlined sentence. I value the book because messy, illegible, snarky, incomprehensibly daring youthful and exuberant - my mother is there. Her handwriting was small with undefined letters (she always said she ruined it by learning shorthand) but it is distinctively hers. Her comments too, hers alone. Yet mine to keep and ponder, even savor, because she wrote in books.